So where's the moolah??

Many people in the Balkans and other places where corruption and the misappropriation of government funds is supposedly rife tend to think that such practices just don't exist in Western societies. Oh, how are they wrong! As I am quick to point out, the West is just as corrupt, only that we hide it better. This fact came to mind with the news that the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction says the US Department of Defence is unable to account properly for 96% of the money! In figures, that means out of just over $9bn (£5.8bn), $8.7bn is unaccounted for! That's a lot of dosh, and this time we can't blame those shifty, dark Iraqi Muslims.

The US military has a novel way to avoid facing the music - the well-tried tactic of drowning in bureaucracy. According to the big brass, the funds were not necessarily missing, but that "spending records might have been archived". That means that in attempting to account for the money might require "significant archival retrieval efforts". How convenient.

Yet again, the chaos of 'freedom and democracy' in Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed, wounded or disabled, and millions had lives destroyed, is just a money-making operation for some in the West. As my ancestors would say 'igrajat so nas' (They're playing with us).