Here is Cash--buy some guns!

Big events transpiring in the area of the Inspector General and in Congress in general. It seems that someone is missing a few millions in US dollars in the Iraq reconstruction issue. Congress is doing the handwringing and we, who have been there, are not surprised.
Understanding that there is a principle difference in how we do business and how the Iraqis (and many mid-Easterners as well) do business is important.
Here is how it works:
1) cash
2) trust
3) time

1) Cash talks. Lots of cash talks louder.
Hand a man a suitcase of cash if you want something.
Drive up in a truck load of cash if you want something big.
--a few months back a semi-truck was hijacked on one of the major highways in Iraq. A group of men in fake uniforms set up a roadblock and stopped a car and the truck that was following it. The car was hosed with automatic rifle fire, wounding or killing the family members in the car. The two men in the truck were dragged out of their truck and shot. The truck was driven away. It was loaded with cash. No suspects. No leads. The answer? Request another truckload of cash to finish the run.

Let's say I want to buy a case lot of rifles. The street price of an AK-47 is $115-$150 each for a reasonably worn, used rifle. It will cost me $200,000 US dollars for a thousand rifles with slings, magazine, bayonet in boxes. When the suitcase of cash is handed over for the goods, the second part comes into play:
2) trust
I trust (?) the guy to come through for me. He just walks out of the office with all that cash and I hope he delivers the goods. He is under some compulsion, because I know where he lives and I will come for him if he doesn't deliver. People taking the cash and running is infrequent because that would be dishonorable.
3) Whenever the goods are ready, I am told to go to such a place or someone will meet me with the case lot of rifles.
Now is when the rub comes....
What happens if I open the cases and find rusted, unusable rifles? How do I get my money back?
Every person who has handeld that suicase of cash to make the deal happen has already taken their cut. The finders cut is between 20 and 40 percent of the gross.
30% to the first guy = $60K, who hands the suitcase to his friend or cousin or contact who knows someone who can get the rifles.
That leaves $130K for the next guy to find the rifles. He takes his 30% ($40K or so) and hands on the suitcase. Now the buyer has less than $100K to buy the thousand rifles. A guy can only buy 1,000 rusted rifles for that little amount of money so that is what he gets. He pays someone to deliver the goods and I open a box of junk instead of my merchandise.
NO ONE GETS A REFUND, because the money is gone and there were no guarantees.
Try to equip an army, rebuild a country, restart the infrastructure, dig the wells, run the electric wires, pump the oil and do the millions of things that cost billions of dollars, knowing that the goods must usually be imported or trucked from elsewhere with no paper trail and no guarantees.
We bought tons of things that turned out to be junk and we could not take it back for a refund.
No one did anything wrong....just nothing went right...the way that we expected it would in the good ol USA. But Congress insists that we do it by our book and we did not realize that the Iraqis did not read our book first.
Some great people will lose their careers and some will go to prison because we did not understand the way to do business.