The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction is the U.S. federal government’s oversight agency for reconstruction in Iraq. It has a tiny staff — 38-odd individuals, responsible for tracking the uses and abuses of roughly $45.4 billion (and not, as commonly believed, $20 billion) in reconstruction funds and thousands of projects across Iraq. It bears its acronym, SIGIR, quite well: “sighir” in Arabic means small.

Given its limited resources, the inspector’s office has been doing a remarkable job, detailing failure after failure after failure (who can forget those $9 billion literally lost to corruption and unaccountability?). The Inspector General is required by law to produce a quarterly report. It’s just published its latest, the 15th since 2004, a 244-page epic that needs six full pages just to define every acronym in the book. (Don’t confuse KRG, the Kurdistan Regional Government, with KRB, or Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary.)

There are some gains: “The average number of reported daily attacks on Coalition personnel dropped this quarter to its lowest level since June 2006,” the inspector writes, “the average number of attacks on Iraq’s civilians also declined. In addition, security conditions notably improved in two of Iraq’s most violent provinces—Anbar and Diyala.” But corruption is rampant, the reconstruction effort lacks a clear strategy or purpose, and for all the money pouring down the Iraqi drain, results are few. One example:

“Since 2003, the United States has provided $19.2 billion to train and equip 360,000 Iraqi soldiers and police officers. But as of September 2007, as reported last month by General [David] Petraeus [Commander of the Multinational forces in Iraq], only about 10 of the 140 army, national police and special operation units are operating independently.”

Then there are this week’s grim reports: With six deaths reported on Tuesday, the 2007 death toll for American servicemen is the heaviest of the war yet. And—as the Inspector General’s report also points out—one out of every seven Iraqi is now a refugee or (the gentler euphemism for virtually the same thing) a displaced person. The small massacres carry on. And the Pentagon and Congress, as always, continue playing their shell games over military spending (officially, the Pentagon’s 2008 military budget clocks in at $460 billion, but that, of course, doesn’t include the nearly $200 billion in “supplemental” appropriations necessary to keep fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And keep fighting, they do. With nothing resembling the mirage of an end in sight.