Report: US Wasted Billions on Iraq War

US government auditors recently reported that the US federal government has wasted billions of dollars of taxpayer money in unnecessary capital projects in Iraq.

"A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets.

As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds has been wasted on these projects — more than 10 percent of the $53.7 billion the US has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency."

This comes as exactly zero surprise to those that believe the US military should never have been sent to Iraq in the first place.

It seems pretty clear that once the disastrous decision to invade Iraq was made, one boneheaded decision after another has then been made in order to justify the original decision to invade in the first place.

Wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer in money to construct assets that the Iraqis don't want or can't use just compounds the original problem, which was to waste trillions of dollars invading a country that posed no national security concerns to the US whatsoever.