Destroying Iraq

Cost overruns.

BAGHDAD -- Skyrocketing security costs have forced U.S. officials here to slash $1 billion more from projects intended to rebuild Iraq's shattered infrastructure, dealing another blow to U.S. plans to pacify Iraq by improving basic services.

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The slow pace in rebuilding Iraq has raised protests from Iraqis, who continue to suffer from a lack of basic services. Many Iraqi homes and businesses have electricity for only a few hours a day. Raw sewage still streams straight into the Tigris River, just as it did during Saddam Hussein's rule.
  Chicago Tribune article

Blame it on those evil insurgents.

Already, one top Iraqi official said she had to cut back on plans to deliver clean water to residents of the restive cities of Fallujah and Mosul.

What?!? We thought those places were cleared of rebels and happy voting Iraqis were back in their homes.

When Congress initially approved $18.4 billion in November 2003 to help rebuild Iraq, the majority of the money was intended to improve Iraq's electrical and water systems, which had suffered from years of neglect during UN-imposed sanctions. But the reconstruction program has struggled to take off in the face of violent attacks, intimidation of workers and allegations of fraud.

In the face of increasing violence, reconstruction officials have shifted funds during the past few months to improve security, Now, the largest chunk of money, about $5 billion, pays for weapons, uniforms and other equipment to help Iraqi forces quell the insurgency.

And we just cut out another billion.

Do you suppose the Congressional accountants will take that $6 billion out of the cost of resconstruction column and put it in the cost of war column? Me neither.

U.S. officials said the latest cuts will hit water and electricity projects the hardest.

The most basic, most needed, rock-bottom projects? How can any other reconstruction projects do anything without water and electricity? Obviously we have no intention of reconstructing Iraq. Destruction is our true goal.

Halliburton Co., under scrutiny for its contracts in Iraq, would receive an extra $1.5 billion as part of the Bush administration's additional war spending proposal for fiscal 2005, a senior U.S. Army budget official said on Friday
  Reuters article

From the Iraqis to Halliburton, with love.

Meanwhile, let's not forget that Iraq has to pay back the rest of the world, including many multinational corporations, for causing them to suffer.

"This is the first time as far as I know that the UN is engaged in retrieving lost corporate assets and profits," he told the Wall Street Journal in 1997, and then mused: "I often wonder at the correctness of that."

But the UNCC's corporate handouts only accelerated. Here is a small sample of who has been getting "reparation" awards from Iraq: Halliburton ($18m), Bechtel ($7m), Mobil ($2.3m), Shell ($1.6m), Nestlé ($2.6m), Pepsi ($3.8m), Philip Morris ($1.3m), Sheraton ($11m), Kentucky Fried Chicken ($321,000) and Toys R Us ($189,449). In the vast majority of cases, these corporations did not claim that Saddam's forces damaged their property in Kuwait - only that they "lost profits" or, in the case of American Express, experienced a "decline in business" because of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait.

Continue reading Why is war-torn Iraq giving $190,000 to Toys R Us?