Washington ? U.S. dollars are flown to Iraq by the planeload. An Army clerk pays Baghdad electricians from a footlocker full of cash. Soldiers string barbed wire at the site where Iraqi retirees get their pensions.

“It doesn’t instill a lot of confidence,” the CATO Institute’s Christopher Preble says of reconstruction finances so far in postwar Iraq.

American troops and officials are handing out $1 million a day in Iraq, according to the Pentagon-led Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

That spending is in addition to multimillion contracts awarded by the State Department and the roughly $1 billion a week it takes to keep U.S. troops in Iraq.

Officials say they’re developing an efficient and well-controlled system for getting money back into the country’s economy again. But financing reconstruction in Iraq is a hugely complicated affair, with money coming in from at least a half dozen sources and going out in everything from tiny cash payments to contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.