How much more STUPID can we get?
In the Lehrer News hour on PBS today a couple of heart breaking stories on Iraq reconstruction. The marine in charge of Nassiryah was pleading for MONEY to fix things and pay the policemen and others working for free. He said for the cost of a HumVee he could fix the pumps to provide water to 100K people. But he has to go through a bunch of bureaucracy to get any resources and the office of reconstruction is evidently still asleep, as far as he is concerned.
Then Tom Friedman summarized the situation: the looting basically was the equivalent of us bombing and destroying all of Iraqi infrastructure -- a major unintended consequence. Then he described how the billion of cash found in Bahgdad was whisked away to Kuwait and then Washington and put under OMB rules, probably never to be seen by the people that really need it, like the marine commander in Nassiriah, for weeks? months? ever???
It's heartbreaking and unless it changes quickly the worst fears of the naysayers regarding post-war Iraq will be realized. I keep hearing, give it time, but time is fast running out. The most incredible thing is that the thing to fix it, MONEY, is available is huge quantities ($5 billion, as I showed in a previous post), but being guarded jealously by the STUPIDS, who, you know, are saving it for the future of the Iraqi people -- the ones that survive the coming cholera epidemics.
Kyros |
