The bulk of the 18 billion was hijacked to pay for military operatons that were out of budget about two months ago. If it hadn't happened we would have run out of war money. The $25 billion supplemental passed in August helped get us to the end of the fiscal year. But as it is, the contracts were held up (not by faceless bureaucrats, but by DoD's budget problems) and so now they are trying to paste over the cracks in the walls by officially redirecting money now that congress is in session, that they already took. Bottomline is that most of the Iraqi reconstruction money will never reach the Iraqis.
It's not as if "hearts and minds" was working in the Sunni Triangle in any case, now was it ?