The Wall Street Journal describes it as “the largest government reconstruction effort since Americans helped to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II.” Just how much the rebuilding of Iraq will cost American taxpayers is a figure still too elusive to capture. But, the President’s request for an additional $87 billion in September atop the $3.7 billion a month we are already spending, indicates the final figure will be, as one pundit described it, quite “an adult number.”

Recent estimates now put the final figure somewhere between $200 billion to as much as half a trillion dollars over the next ten years.

America’s Iraq-sticker-shock may turn to anger when taxpayers discover the small group of men and companies reaping the benefits of President Bush’s newly found appreciation for nation building.

While Vice President Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, has attracted most press attention for its Iraq-related contracts, Halliburton is hardly the whole story. Its share is but a slice of the multi-billion dollar pie being divided up among a brotherhood of unusually well connected and economically related individuals and entities.

…the biggest US defense contractors who have cornered critical chunks of defense work have achieved an even more dubious status: TBF/ TBJ - “Too Big to Fail/Too Big to Jail.”

Read the report (Adobe PDF) by Misleader.org. Misleader.org will provide an accurate daily chronicle for journalists of mis-representations, distortions and downright misleading statements by President Bush and the Bush Administration.