Let's begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that's just what happened as the starting gun went off.

It's never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American "reconstruction" of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed "as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security." It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, "feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks" and that was only the beginning of its problems.