No doubt some of them, an extremely small number, had profiteering in mind, but no, I don't think the vast majority were thinking about this at all.
If they're going to bring all the materials, technical, and engineering folk from abroad, do all the surveys from scratch, etc, yada yada, sure I can see this kind of price tag, but they're full of shit if that's what they're up to. Fifty million should buy a lot of bridge in Iraq right now and:
I said, in my post, if it's truthful, then they're going to wind up getting a lot of heat. But there's lots of possibilities: The writer's cousin could have been exaggerating, the writer may have got it wrong, it may have been totally made up, it was a bad estimate, there was a currency conversion hiccup, etc.
This is the internet and I don't take these kind of stories at face value.
What got my attention actually wasn't something I learned from the writer, but the well known fact that Iraq has lots of competent public works engineers: They're really good at bridges, dams, roads, etc. Any satellite photo can show you that, not to mention the TV coverage. So the US should be using them.... |
