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Blogroll Notes on Iraq and Iran
They're a couple days old, but there were some interesting observations on Iraq and Iran in my blogroll recently.
Chris Albritton of Back-to-Iraq cites his friend George Packer's New Yorker article and his own experience in noting that the United States's refugee policy is particularly humiliating and embarrassing when it comes to Iraqis who have served as American translators. Over at Rhinocrisy Hedgehog makes an oft-repeatable point about the amount of money we've spent on this war and occupation compared with most Iraqi's annual income.
The U.S. has spent enough money there that it could have given everyone their per-capita income for each of the last four years and still had enough on hand to keep paying those people their salaries for another 57 years.Chemical weapons expert Armchair Generalist notes an LAT about how Iran's alleged desire for "weapons of mass destruction" might have something to do with the weapons used on them by a US-backed Saddam Hussein. Both AG & Phil Carter note that the army has been forced to adopt a just-in-time state of readiness; according to a recent NYT article the 82nd Airborne does not have a division ready brigade on standby. Carter:
The American military is a tremendously powerful and flexible instrument, but it must be employed skillfully and with great care. If we blunt its edge in Iraq, or break it, we may suffer terrible consequences down the road.Sigh.
Comments (2)
Taking up Hedgehog's point, just think how much of that money has simply gone to corruption. From
this report of an Iraq fraud indictment:
You know what they say about cockroaches...
Less egregious but at a much larger scale, the bidding process awarding Iraqi reconstruction contracts sparked controversy at the time, with allegations that they were given out to corporate cronies of the Bush administration. Four years later, the inspector general's audit released Thursday prompted Sen. Lieberman to comment that "we've seen billions of dollars wasted" in the reconstruction effort.
Posted on Mar-24-2007 | Link
yeah i remember iraqi crew bids for infrastructure fixes were coming in somewhere below 25% the cost of the foreign companies'. another of those aspects of "getting the economy working" that's getting abused in louisiana and mississippi, too.
it's like a fractal. every aspect of this offers its own tiny identical explanation of how it went wrong.
Posted on Mar-24-2007 | Link