You may have seen the by-now-rather-famous Riverbend blog, written by a young Iraqi woman living in Bagdhad. You probably also know that U.S. estimates of rebuilding Iraq are incredibly high — around $90 billion so far. Well, when it comes to government contracting, and particularly where it comes to handing out the pork, prices aren’t always what they seem. Here’s a recent posting by the Riverbend woman:

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad- we’ll call the company H. This company is well-known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !!

Sure, she’s probably biased, so this story may be factually skewed. (Indeed, critics jumped all over her story at Chris Albritton’s Back-to-Iraq blog.) But then again, government contracting has historically proven to be so frequently skewed that it’s as if we were shovelling money straight through Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass.

(Thanks to Ross Judson for finding this one!)