You've got to take into account the $8.8 billion of Iraqi money diverted by the US authorities during 14 months of the Coalition Provisional Authority 2003 to 2004; and the "$800m...handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed."

This piece in the Guardian sums it up And it is largely drawn from a report carried out by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US federal reserve, and a report by the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

"The biggest source of illegal funds to Saddam Hussein was approved not by officials of the UN but by officials in the US.

And once Saddam was out of the picture the financial jiggery pokery continued:

"Auditors at the Pentagon...allege that, in the course of just one contract, a subsidiary of Halliburton overcharged it for imported fuel by $61m. This appears to have been officially sanctioned. In November, the New York Times obtained a letter from an officer in the US Army Corps of Engineers insisting that she would not "succumb to the political pressures from the ... US embassy to go against my integrity and pay a higher price for fuel than necessary". She was overruled by her superiors, who issued a memo insisting that the prices the company was charging were "fair and reasonable", and that it wouldn't be asked to provide the figures required to justify them."