Offered Without Comment

Frank Rich's Article on Iraq War Profiteering

is remarkable in a few respects -- the human toll it has taken, the failure of anybody heretofore to provide adequate oversight and this little statistic:

As the investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele observed in the October Vanity Fair, America has to date “spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.” (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.)