Another billion goes missing in Iraq

It's been known since last year that some $9 billion in reconstruction money has just vanished. That happens when your keeping accounts by the sophisticated "hand out duffel bags of cash" method. Luckily for our nation's struggling contractors, the gravy train's still a-rollin'.

Officials from the British Ministry of Defence had already warned US and Iraqi authorities against the squandering of money - and have been proved right, on a catastrophic scale.

A report compiled by the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit has concluded that at least half, and probably more, of $1.27bn (£700m) of Iraqi money spent on military procurement has disappeared into a miasma of kickbacks and vanished middlemen - or else has been spent on useless equipment.

Any newspaper that uses the word miasma is all right in my book. I'd really like to crunch the numbers here, although it'll be a little sketchy (embezzlement usually is). If we've spent $200 billion, and some $10 billion has vanished, that would be 5% of the cost of the war. The war costs us approximately $122,820 per minute. That's more than $6,000 being stolen from us every minute we're there. My summer job pays $13 an hour. I want to be a contractor.