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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (7311)	9/9/2003 12:43:30 PM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793779

Do you think iraq is well funded enough Mike, I think that now there is a chance of success, but we are by no means out of the woods. The biggest problem that I see, is the great inefficiency with which the money is being spent in Iraq. And the key reason for this is that the money is being funneled through US contractors by Bremer's administration. It would be much more efficient to funnel the money directly to Iraqis. Some of it will be stolen, no doubt, but the rest will do a much better job at guarding and improving the infrastructure. Another obvious advantage will be that we will gain much greater goodwill among the Iraqis, something that we sorely need to get the process of approving a constitution and conducting elections completed. I also think the attempt to force feed free-market ideas at this time to a country that has only known rigid central government economic control for generations is ill-conceived and will prove extremely costly. It took more than a decade for Eastern European countries to recover from similar shocks after the fall of communism. How long are we prepared to spend $100 billion a year in Iraq? Let the Iraqis decide what kind of economic system they want after they have free elections. It is evidently costing us many times more than what Saddam was spending during the post-1991 period, operating under crushing UN sanctions and constant US bombardment. The oil revenues he was using were in the low single digit billion range per year, yet he was not only able to keep the infrastructure going at much higher levels than now, but he was also able to keep hundreds of thousands of loyalists in relative luxury, build countless palaces, and sock away billions for a rainy day to boot. Kyros