If you are thinking about an Iraqi Marshall plan here is an excerpt from an article.
Perhaps this is a good place to start re-building Iraq. Cost, around 25-50 billion over a 4 year period(based on a per capita basis times 10-20 to compensate for inflation). This may be over estimated since the industrial stucture in Iraq is not as badly damaged as Europe was in 1947. On the other hand there is so much corruption in the US today(remember the thousands used for hammers and toilet seats) that costs may well exceed 50 billion.
Then(1947) the US was a nation of pragmatic idealists. Today we have Enron, a record high deficit, huge consumer debt etc.
"Origins of the Marshall Plan
Marshall’s Worldview in Early 1947
Richard Neustadt and Ernest May observed in their book, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (1986), that Marshall had developed the habit of "seeing time as a stream": that is, of applying a consciousness of past problems, ideas, and solutions to the present rather than seeing every current problem in isolation and thus as new and unique (pp. 247-28). Marshall was not a scholar of military or political history, but he read widely and was excellent at extracting accurate lessons from his reading and from his own experience. In many respects, Marshall sought during World War II to avoid the mistakes he had witnessed in World War I and its immediate aftermath.
Consequently, Marshall was increasingly disturbed after the autumn of 1945 at what he considered the disintegration of American military power rather than the careful demobilization and reorganization for which he had planned since 1943. As he said publicly several times in the latter half of 1945, the United States courted disaster for itself and the world if it again fell "into a state of disinterested weakness" and failed to fulfill its international responsibilities for aid and assistance in postwar economic and political reconstruction. (See his October 29, 1945, speech to the New York Herald Tribute Forum, and his November 17, 1945, speech to the Salvation Army National Convention in Marshall Papers, Pentagon Office Selected, Speeches file.)...."
marshallfoundation.org |
