Iraq: The Wacky Service Comedy

If you haven't read The New York Times' account of the new audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, you should take a look. Anyone with sense knew that all the money pouring into that country was bound to spawn a lot of waste and fraud, but now we know more about just what waste and fraud we've been buying.

Here's my favorite bit, which sounds like a rejected storyline for a sequel to Stripes:

In one case, an American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money. Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.

It's just like the MSM, of course, to highlight only the unauthorized gambling sprees that lost money while ignoring all the times our fighting men came out ahead. And leave it to the Times to lose sight of the big picture: Were we supposed to ask Iraq to field a boxing team without American assistance? Are you some kind of isolationist nut?