>While I won't disagree there has been a lot of waste and mismanagement in the reconstruction of Iraq, I think you are missing a couple things:
>
>1) There was no banking industry in Iraq after the war. It was a cash economy.

Yup. Gunney sacks to hold bricks ($100 bundles from the mint).

>2) Numerous studies have stressed the increased costs of security as one of the main reasons for draining away so much of the reconstruction money. Unfortunately I do not have a link available.

Lookup "Custer Battles", an outfit hired to provide security of a lot of important stuff at very high cost. Look for the profiles of the two principals, their business assets before the war, their staff counts, their expertise in the area of security, etc.
It was a crooked operation from day 1, designed to suck money as fast as they could.

>3) We (the US) has spent billions of our own money trying to repair the infrastructure there. It outweighs this alleged $20B by quite a bit.

Which really only makes the whole thing sadder. You should have seen what was being passed off as 'reconstructed' after hundreds of millions 'spent' on individual 'projects'.

>4) Progress has been made. Not as much as we would like, but it has been made. Without having seen the program, my guess is that the presentation of the bad was much more important to the authors as portraying the good that has been done.

I think you're right. The documentary makers, of course, had their point to prove. I think they made their point in spades. But I agree that some of the money likely got contracted to honourable people who worked diligently to deliver good results. But it does look like they were in the minority.

>
>>People may think the "oil for food" skullduggery was bad, but this makes that look like a small prank by comparison. I wonder what's holding up publicity on the matter.
>>
>>Sad!
>
>And again, not true. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil-for-Food_Programme
>
>The GAO estimates that the Saddam Hussein regime generated $10.1 billion in illegal revenues. This figure includes $5.7 billion from oil smuggling and $4.4 billion in illicit surcharges on oil sales and after-sales charges on suppliers. The scale of the fraud was far more extensive than the GAO had previously estimated.
>
>The difference is not huge in numbers so much as in intent. Saddam and his henchmen purloined that money for their own benefit, under the guise of supporting his people, and with the complicity of the UN.

It was different indeed. At least in the case of Iraq American-style, it got spread around widely and resulted in palaces on U.S. (or elsewhere) soil instead of in Iraq. Imagine approx. 16 billion of Iraqi's OWN $$$ and many many more billions of U.S. taxpayers' $$$ delivering "improvements" that make their beneficiaries cry. A PR campaign no one needed, least of all the U.S.