A Little Perspective on $87 billion.
or "A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon it starts to add up to some real money."

On September 7th, 2003, President Bush announced on national television that he was asking the Congress to grant him an additional $87 billion dollars for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1, to continue the fight on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But $87 billion is an impossibly high number for anyone to visualize. Let's have a look....
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  thanks to The J-Walk Weblog

No money, no play: US on the brink in Iraq

What the donor government negotiators will be bringing in their pockets to Madrid, however, will not be their personal money nor that of the corporations, but that of their country's taxpayers. The Madrid meeting is an effort by the US to transfer the burden of Iraq from the Americans to, say, French, Japanese and German taxpayers. Borrowing from the IMF and the World Bank on behalf of the Iraqi people will pass the liability to future Iraqi generations, who will then be indebted to the IFIs and subjected to their conditions. For the burden they'll bear, others will be reaping the profits.

Whether the US would still consider it financially worthwhile to continue occupying Iraq thus depends on the following: how quickly Iraq's oil wells can rake in cash, the US taxpayers' willingness to part with their money, and the readiness of the donor countries to infuse funds. The Iraqis seem not to figure anywhere in the equation. Relying on oil is simply impossible today. When the going gets really tough, the second could still be an option, but not something Bush – as champion of tax cuts for the rich and presiding over a weak and deficit-ridden economy – would really want to push. The third then could be the only available option left
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Rift grows between Iraq's interim council and US led coalition

A rift is growing between Iraq's interim government and the United States-led coalition over the deployment of Turkish troops to Iraq.
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Turkey to Deploy Troops in Defiance of New Iraqi Leaders, Turmoil Deepens

Ankara moved on to a collision course with the interim leadership in Baghdad after deciding to send troops to its war-torn neighbor as the turmoil deepens in Iraq.
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Attempts to Moderate Stance of IGC on Turks

The Bush administration is saying that it will not take "no" for an answer from the Interim Governing Council on the issue of Turkish troops. Washington naively tends to lump all Muslims together and had assumed that Sunni Muslim Turkish forces would be welcome in Iraq, especially in the Sunni Arab areas. In fact, there are Arab nationalist resentments against Ottoman rule, and Sunni Islamists in Iraq view the largely secular Turkish army as a horde of Voltairean infidels. Of course, Iraqi Kurds are most exercised, fearing that Turkey will find a way to interfere in their region.
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AWOL State of Mind: Calls From Soldiers Desperate to Leave Iraq Flood Hotline

Morale among some war-weary GIs in Iraq is so low that a growing number of soldiers - including some now home on R&R - are researching the consequences of going AWOL, according to a leading support group.
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Everywhere and nowhere, Saddam retains his grip on Baghdad's imagination
Suzanne Goldenberg finds six months after the dictator's statue fell, the US authority has not extinguished his legacy

A more substantial assault on Saddam's legacy is under way in the Republican Palace, where the occupation authority is making preparations to dismantle the food distribution system which gave free rations of flour, rice, cooking oil and other staples to every Iraqi.

Described by the UN as the world's most efficient food network, the system still keeps Iraqis from going hungry. But the US civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, views it as a dangerous socialist anachronism. The coalition provisional authority (CPA) is planning to abolish it in January, despite warnings from its own technical experts that this could lead to hunger and riots.

Such haste in obliterating all traces of Saddam is disconcerting for many Iraqis, especially the educated elite who were part of his bureaucracy. Many say the US has yet to appreciate how that bureaucracy functioned, and they fear that their national history is being replaced with another, without their consent.

"I don't want absolutely everything then to be portrayed as negative," said one former bureaucrat. "If they portray everything then as bad, then the world they will portray now is that just because Saddam is gone we are happy."

Since returning to Baghdad I have received several lectures from CPA officials and Washington lobbyists on what it was like in Iraq under Saddam and under America's bombardment. They bear no relation to anything I experienced during my weeks in Iraq at that time. The lobbyists insist it is the truth.

So it is easy for me to understand the disorientation of Iraqis as they try to sort out which truths will be relegated, and which will survive.
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Jewelry and Raids...

Yesterday afternoon we went to visit a relative who had recently come home from London. He wasn’t a political refugee there, nor was he a double-agent… or anything glamorous… just a man who had decided to live his life in England. He came to visit every year, usually during December. He was in a state of… shock at what he saw around him. Every few minutes he would get up in disbelief, trailing off in mid-sentence, to stand in the window- looking out at the garden like he could perhaps see beyond the garden wall and into the streets of Baghdad.

“We watch it on television over there… but it’s nothing like *this*…” And I knew what he meant. Seeing it on the various networks covering the war is nothing like living in its midst. Watching the 7 o’clock news and hearing about ‘a car bomb in Baghdad’ is nothing like standing in the street, wary of the moving vehicles, wondering if one of them is going to burst into a flying ball of flames and shrapnel. Seeing the checkpoints on Al-Jazeera, CNN or BBC is nothing like driving solemnly up to them, easing the car to a stop and praying that the soldier on the other side doesn’t think you look decidedly suspicious… or that his gun doesn’t accidentally go off.
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Slaves of the Foreigners

By radically opening up the Iraqi economy, America wants to attract international corporations to the banks of the Tigris. Iraqis are concerned that their country is being sold out.
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A Shi'ite warning to America