Three giant pallets each loaded with cash amounting to more than $4 billion and weighing a total of 363 tons were sent to Baghdad aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, it has been revealed to Congress.Of the more than $12 billion sent to Iraq, $8.8 billion remains unaccounted, without any paper trail that would lead to a successful audit. Is this a problem?? Apparently not for most of the GOP House members. Their litany of excuses ran from the mundane "war is war," to the more esoteric "it was Saddam's oil money so why would we care?" Perhaps the most heinous of the vile attitudes expressed was from a GOP idiot who suggested that $8.8 billion wasn't really all that much money.
What an asshole. But just for the record, what could $8.8 billion do for our economy at this point. Well, let's start with the original premise that the Iraq war was going to be paid for by Iraq. Thus the billions shipped in US dollars (non-exchangeable in Iraq by the way, by CPA regulations and laws) were allegedly supposed to have been turned over to the Secretary of the Treasury to reimburse the citizens of the US for expenses in Iraq. That clearly didn't happen.
The Iraq billions would cover the shortfall in the US education budget to pay for mandatory and compulsury programs such as NCLB. They could have paid for doubling the Pell and other higher education student loan programs, or covered all of the costs of Title I for one year. There are several states whose combined operating budgets could have been paid for by the billions. Perhaps the most useful of all possible choices would have been to invest the money into levee rebuilding after the Iraq invasion; an effort that would have prevented the damage of Katrina.
Oh well, it wasn't ours, right??
