Any reason to hope?

Let's take a quick look at the case of

Robert Isakson, who filed a whistleblower suit against contractor Custer Battles in 2004, alleging the company — with which he was briefly associated — bilked the U.S. government out of tens of millions of dollars by filing fake invoices and padding other bills for reconstruction work.
He and his co-plaintiff, William Baldwin, a former employee fired by the firm, doggedly pursued the suit for two years, gathering evidence on their own and flying overseas to obtain more information from witnesses. Eventually, a federal jury agreed with them and awarded a $10 million judgment against the now-defunct firm, which had denied all wrongdoing.
It was the first civil verdict for Iraq reconstruction fraud.
But in 2006, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III overturned the jury award. He said Isakson and Baldwin failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government.
Not a single Iraq whistleblower suit has gone to trial since.
“It’s a sad, heartbreaking comment on the system,” said Isakson, a former FBI agent who owns an international contracting company based in Alabama. “I tried to help the government, and the government didn’t seem to care.”

A partial list of similar shabby, and even worse, treatment of whistleblowers calling attention to fraud in Iraq is detailed in this AP story.

The truth is that the entire Iraq adventure was fraudulent from the start. Some war cheerleaders may have had loftier reasons for supporting the invasion, yet Dick Cheney's Halliburton, and other businesses driving the war machine, have never seen the whole affair as anything more or less than a cash cow. These interests aren't bothered in the least to learn Iraq has become an interminable quagmire. The longer chaos reigns, the longer their opportunity to rake in obscene profits.