{"id":14790,"date":"2015-11-25T08:44:07","date_gmt":"2015-11-25T13:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14790"},"modified":"2015-11-25T08:44:07","modified_gmt":"2015-11-25T13:44:07","slug":"tomgram-rebecca-gordon-corruption-u-s-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14790","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A."},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/post\/176073\/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_corruption_u.s.a.\/#more\" target=\"_blank\">Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A.<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>I recently took a little trip into the past and deep into America\u2019s distant war zones to write a piece I called \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/post\/176068\/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_roads_to_nowhere,_ghost_soldiers,_and_a_$43_million_gas_station_in_afghanistan\/\" target=\"_blank\">It\u2019s a $cam<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 It was, for me, an eye-opening journey into those long-gone years of American \u201cnation-building\u201d and \u201creconstruction\u201d in Afghanistan and Iraq.\u00a0 Mind you, I still remembered some of what had been reported at the time like the \u201curine-soaked\u201d police academy\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/11\/06\/world\/middleeast\/06police.html\" target=\"_blank\">built<\/a>\u00a0in Baghdad by an American private contractor with taxpayer dollars.\u00a0 But it was the cumulative effect of it all that now struck me &#8212; one damning report after another that made it clear Washington was incapable of building or rebuilding anything whatsoever.\u00a0 There were all those poorly constructed or unfinished military barracks, police stations, and outposts for the new national security forces the U.S. military was so eagerly \u201cstanding up\u201d in both countries.\u00a0 There were the unfinished or miserably constructed schools, training centers, and \u201croads to nowhere.\u201d\u00a0 There were those local militaries and police forces whose ranks were heavily\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/blog\/175907\/tomgram%3A_william_astore,_america's_hollow_foreign_legions\" target=\"_blank\">populated by<\/a>\u00a0\u201cghost soldiers.\u201d\u00a0 There was that shiny new U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan that cost\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/projects.propublica.org\/graphics\/boondoggle\" target=\"_blank\">$25 million<\/a>\u00a0and no one wanted or would ever use. It was, in short, a litany of fiascoes and disasters that never seemed to end.<\/p>\n<p>Financially, Washington had invested sums in both countries that\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/bw\/articles\/2014-07-31\/afghanistan-has-cost-the-u-dot-s-dot-more-than-the-marshall-plan\" target=\"_blank\">far exceeded<\/a>\u00a0the Marshall Plan, which so successfully put Western Europe back on its feet after World War II. Yet Iraq and Afghanistan were left on their knees amid a carnival of corruption and misspent taxpayer money.\u00a0 What made revisiting this spectacle so stunning wasn\u2019t just the inability of the U.S. military, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and a crew of crony warrior corporations raking in the big bucks to do anything right, but that this was the United States of America.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Corruption U.S.A. I recently took a little trip into the past and deep into America\u2019s distant war zones to write a piece I called \u201cIt\u2019s a $cam.\u201d\u00a0 It was, for me, an eye-opening journey into those long-gone years of American \u201cnation-building\u201d and \u201creconstruction\u201d in Afghanistan and Iraq.\u00a0 Mind you, I still remembered [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[2487,1769,281,442,2957,3501,2138,712,783,7413,827,844,865],"class_list":["post-14790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-afghanistan","tag-corruption","tag-europe","tag-iraq","tag-kleptocracy","tag-marshall-plan","tag-private-contractors","tag-security","tag-taxes","tag-tomdispatch","tag-united-states","tag-us-military","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14791,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14790\/revisions\/14791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}