One of Many Examples

I sure hope that Canada's war on terror/democracy spreading/nation building/insert other lie here efforts in Afghanistan go at least as well as America's effort to help rebuild the lives of the Iraqi people.

From yesterday's New York Times:

A $243 million program led by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build 150 health care clinics in Iraq has in some cases produced little more than empty shells of crumbling concrete and shattered bricks cemented together into uneven walls, two reports by a federal oversight office have found.
The reports, released yesterday, detail a close inspection of five of the clinics in the northern city of Kirkuk as well as a sweeping audit of the entire program, which began in March 2004 as a heavily promoted effort to improve health care for ordinary Iraqis. The reports say that none of the five clinics in Kirkuk and only 20 of the original 150 across the country will be completed without new financing.
Whatever the causes, the impact of the failure on the American effort to rebuild Iraq is enormous, said the inspector general, Stuart W. Bowen
Jr.

"This was the most important program in the health sector," Mr. Bowen said in an interview. "It sought to fulfill a strategy to get health services to rural and remote poor in Iraq."

Now the lead contractor Parsons, and its subcontractors have a quarter of a billion dollars of the US public's money and the Iraqi's have, well, not a hell of a lot, but I guess they must be getting used to that.