Your tax dollars hard at work: Iraq edition

There are millions of ways to slice this — almost as many millions as there have been dollars wasted … OK, maybe not that many, because that would be a lot of ways — but nothing better illustrates the futility of America’s 21st century folly in Iraq (well, except for maybe the hundreds of thousands of dead and millions displaced) than a grainy video currently making the rounds. The aerial footage is widely reported (but not independently verified here) to be of Iraqi government bombs destroying the airfield in Mosul.

Mosul, of course, is the Northern Iraq city captured by ISIL (also known as ISIS) earlier this week. The airport in Mosul, of course, is the one that was almost entirely rebuilt and upgraded in the last decade, thanks to tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Now, U.S.-trained Iraqi government pilots, flying U.S.-made and paid-for planes, are dropping U.S-made and paid-for bombs on a U.S.-made and paid-for air base to keep U.S.-made and paid-for helicopters and munitions out of the hands of an insurgent force armed, in some part, by U.S.-financed aid to Syrian rebels, whose leader was reportedly radicalized while he was held for four years by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca in Southern Iraq.

What is it they say, follow the money? Well, this is where it leads.