State Department employee Peter Van Buren gives a ground-level account of that waste and corruption in his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. Van Buren was a veteran Foreign Service officer who’d spent much of his career in Japan, Korea and Taiwan when he volunteered for Iraq service in 2009. He was sent to Baghdad as part of a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team, where he was in charge of a group trying to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure and economy. For the next year, he encountered oblivious bureaucrats, comically misguided projects, greedy contractors, a never-ending cash flow, and campaigns aimed at improving the lives of Iraqi people. But many of those campaigns were misguided, says Van Buren, and they often wasted a lot of money.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/26/140711553/the-greedy-battle-for-iraqs-hearts-and-minds