Americans handing out a million dollars a day in Iraq
Associated Press Published Tuesday, May 27, 2003  WASHINGTON
(AP) -- U.S. dollars are flown to Iraq by the planeload. An Army
clerk pays Baghdad electricians from a footlocker full of cash.
Soldiers string barbed wire at the site where Iraqi retirees get
their pensions.  "It doesn't instill a lot of confidence," the
CATO Institute's Christopher Preble says of reconstruction
finances so far in postwar Iraq.  American troops and officials
are handing out $1 million a day in Iraq, according to the
Pentagon-led Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance.  That spending is in addition to multimillion
contracts awarded by the State Department and the roughly $1
billion a week it takes to keep U.S. troops in Iraq.  Officials
say they're developing an efficient and well-controlled system
for getting money back into the country's economy again. But
financing reconstruction in Iraq is a hugely complicated affair,
with money coming in from at least a half