“If you can think of a better way to get ice, I'd like to hear it.”

A sign that the Iraqi occupation is not being run as well as it can be comes from this month’s Vanity Fair, as Richard Perle tells a “story he heard from an Iraqi cabinet minister ….

“..about a friend who was asked to lease a warehouse in Baghdad to a contractor for the Americans in the Green Zone. It turned out they were looking for someplace to store ice for their drinks. But, the man asked, wouldn't storing ice in Iraq's hot climate be expensive? Weren't the Americans making ice as and when they needed it? Thus he learned the extraordinary truth: that the ice was trucked in from Kuwait, 300 miles away, in regular convoys. The convoys, says Perle, "came under fire all the time. So we were sending American forces in harm's way, with full combat capability to support them, helicopters overhead, to move goddamn ice from Kuwait to Baghdad." Via The December Vanity Fair.

Here at Ten AM World HQ, we used to laugh about that very same scenario.