$1 million a corpse

Our world has reached so elevated a level of absurdity that the guy from Monty Python makes more sense than anyone else does. As I've said before, Terry Jones is my favorite former member of the troop. His superb new piece notes that the United States has spent one million dollars for every Iraqi killed:

Then the White House ensured there would be no overseeing of what was spent. In the original Iraq spending bill, which earmarked the first $87bn to go down the drain, there was a provision for the general accounting office to keep a check on things, but that provision was stripped from the bill - even though the Senate had originally voted for it 97 to 0.

But what I want to know is: how do they actually spend all that money? Well the answer is: they don't. According to the website Halliburtonwatch, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR bills the US taxpayer for $50-$80 per day for labourers working for it in Iraq, but pays them only $5-$16 per day.

And:

Perhaps it's just as well that in 2003 the White House removed from the Iraq spending bill any provision to penalise war profiteers who defrauded US taxpayers.

By the way: Those of you who recall my riposte to Aaron Russo's From Freedom to Fascism may want to scan the letters generated by the Terry Jones piece. One commentator trots out that old Woodrow Wilson quote, closer to the original in wording than in the Russo version, but still yanked from context to reverse Wilson's intended point. Yes, I know that any argument over Wilson is a digression from Jones' subject -- although in a larger sense, the treatment of reality as a malleable object gets to the heart of what's wrong with the Bush era.