The Iraq War is turning into one of the costliest and most over-wrought military endeavors in recent American history, and a referendum on the excess and ego of the Bush administration. Now, in the second year of the Iraq pull-out, roughly $2.4 billion in equipment and infrastructure, including famously outsized military bases, will prove too costly to ship back to the U.S. Instead, the Pentagon has decided to hand over these assets to the Iraqi government and avoid the cost of transport. . To date, there has already been equipment handed over to Iraq worth almost $250 million by "fair market value", which means in reality it may have cost taxpayers much more. However, with the largest military bases still active, and much of the equipment warehoused in those bases, the greatest portion of the hand-over has yet to take place. The sheer amount of waste, all purchase with borrowed money (of which has added over a trillion to the deficit in interest alone), shows an incredible lack of responsibility in the administration of the war, starting at the top.

Over $2 billion in base-building contracts were awarded from 2004 on, a result of the Bush administrations grand visions for future operations in the Middle East. The Pentagon had planned to make Iraq the staging area for future U.S. military operations, obviously planning for both a quick and decisive rebuilding of the Iraq nation, and a larger and longer presence. Many of the bases were built to reflect this, with plenty of amenities and operational areas that were much more extensive than even the Iraq War required. Executive Director of the National Security Network, Heather Hurlburt, remarks to the The Huffington Post, speaking about the waste then and the current economic situation,  "thinking about the size of what was wasted there, and thinking about how what we spent in Iraq was all borrowed," she said. "In a crazy way, what we left in Iraq was our good credit rating." The amount of waste is made only worse by the fact that much of the money has been lost to corruption by contractors and Iraqi officials, and with such an incredible influx of currency (trillions of which were simply airlifted in bricks of cash) it's nearly impossible to account for exactly how much is unaccounted in the the hand-over.

In 2005 the administration signed off on $1.2 billion in base-building alone, with a comparable amount in equipment and related contractor costs. However, there was a devastating shortage of equipment and transport available to the National Guard in their response to Hurricane Katrina. In 2005 and 2006, parents of soldiers deployed in Iraq were using their own money to mail flak jackets because of a shortage from defense contractors. With the massive amount of money, equipment, and infrastructure that is now being publicly disclosed, we also see the scale of mismanagement and wasted revenue. It may make things slightly easier to swallow were the Iraqis to greatly benefit from their inheritance, but much of it will not be usable to the much smaller and under-supported government apparatus. It seems that this is very simply a cost-saving measurement, cutting our losses by leaving our legacy in the Iraq desert.