Remember the “horrible” Oil for Food scandal those nasty Europeans perpetrated with Saddam to steal away millions from a program designed to help average Iraqi citizens following the first Gulf War?

Apparently it was small potatoes compared to what we have managed in just 3 short years of occupation. Ths is an excerpt from the Mahablog. The entire thing is a must-read.

We’ve known for some time that the Iraq “reconstruction” effort was doomed by incompetence and corruption, and that billions of dollars are unaccounted for. But there are some details in today’s Guardian that stunned even me.

Let’s start here:

At the start of the Iraq war, around $23bn-worth of Iraqi money was placed in the trusteeship of the US-led coalition by the UN. The money, known as the Development Fund for Iraq and consisting of the proceeds of oil sales, frozen Iraqi bank accounts and seized Iraqi assets, was to be used in a “transparent manner”, specified the UN, for “purposes benefiting the people of Iraq”.

I may have read that before, but I wasn’t aware of it. Anyway, we’ve got $23 billion in Iraqi money –

Because the Iraqi banking system was in tatters, the funds were placed in an account with the Federal Reserve in New York. From there, most of the money was flown in cash to Baghdad. Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash. And that is where it all began to go wrong.

“Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money,” says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the governing Coalition Provisional Authority. “We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced.”

Sorta gives “play money” a new meaning.

Remember all those wingnuts who were screaming about the corruption and fraud of the Oil for Food program before the invasion? It was one of the favorite talking points among those groping around for justifications for bush’s action and it was ramped up even more as the whole WMD fiasco began to come to light after we invaded and found nothing.

So if the Oil for Food fraud was one of the major justifications for labeling Saddam an international pariah and criminal what does this massive and ongoing fraud and corruption say about bush?