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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (44006)	4/27/2004 12:49:41 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

great quote Yeah, I like that. Ah, but I was so much older then I'm younger than that now. elyrics.net lurqer

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (44006)	4/27/2004 4:24:28 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

ANOTHER BUSH PLAN GOES WRONG!!! Attacks Halt Rebuilding of Iraq Disaster Facing Power Network as Contractors Pull Out by Jamie Wilson Vital reconstruction work in Iraq has almost completely ground to a halt after being "screwed up" by the deteriorating security situation in the country, senior coalition officials have told the Guardian. Unless the situation improves dramatically in the next few weeks, essential work on the electricity network will not be complete before the extreme heat of the summer arrives, raising the prospect of months of power cuts similar to those that led to riots and widespread discontent last year, the officials warned. "It is screwing up the timetables completely, so for things like electricity, essential work that should have been done over the last three or four weeks has not been done," one senior official said. "We are at risk of moving into the summer period with the repairs not complete, which means we are going to have massive demand and not very good provision. So from that point of view, it is a disaster." The warnings came as it emerged that the insurgency has forced two of the biggest contractors, General Electric and Siemens, to suspend operations in Iraq. Siemens has been involved in attempts to restore the Daura power plant in Baghdad, listed by USAID, the development agency, as being one of the most important electrical projects in the country. The security problems are delaying work on about two dozen power plants, as well as a number of large-scale water and sewage treatment projects across Iraq. The American-run coalition provisional authority has always considered the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Iraq's electrical and water infrastructure as being key to persuading Iraqis of America's goodwill, as well as crucial in efforts to create a functioning democracy. Officials said that since the increase in violence at the beginning of the month, nearly all foreign contractors working in Iraq had either fled the country or pulled workers back to secure bases. "The best figure we've got is that about 25% of contractors had currently pulled out of country, albeit temporarily," a coalition source said. "However, that is putting a brave face on it because the other 75% have pulled back to base. They will argue that they are doing essential activities in the base like getting the paperwork straight. Yeah, well give me a break, how many times can you rewrite the scope of works and re-do your personnel accounts?" So far this month more than 40 civilian foreign nationals have been kidnapped and 10 killed. In the same period nearly 100 US troops have died, the worst monthly total since the invasion of Iraq. Several countries including Russia, Portugal, Poland and France have urged their citizens to evacuate amid the wave of attacks on civilians. The government in Moscow offered to airlift more than 800 Russians and citizens of ex-Soviet states out of Iraq after eight Russian and Ukrainian workers were briefly kidnapped in Baghdad. The men, who spent 19 hours in captivity, were working for the Russian contractor Interenergoservis, building a power plant in Baghdad. It is understood that work has almost entirely stopped since the kidnappings. A coalition official said one of the main problems was that because of knock-on effects each day's delay now equated to a week's delay further down the line. "If that continues for another few days or a week then we can keep a brave face on it and say it is not really affecting the critical path with the exception of a few individual projects, but if it goes on very much longer after that then we would have to say we are losing momentum of the project as a whole," he said. "Either things can get better in the sense that they return to a level of security problems that we had five or six weeks ago or the worst case scenario is what is happening in Falluja and Najaf where we get substantially greater violence, substantially greater numbers of contractor kidnappings, and, if that happens, essentially it will mean a freezing of the reconstruction effort at that stage." Publicly, the British and US governments are trying to play down the extent of the problems. Brian Wilson, the prime minister's special envoy in Iraq, yesterday told a conference of businessmen in London that despite the security situation they should not lose sight of the longer- term objective of helping Iraqis to rebuild their infrastructure and economy. "In doing so we will help Iraq restore the confidence and prosperity they deserve. So it is all the more important that you use this event to build relationships and sow the seeds of a long-term commitment to Iraq and its people," he told the conference, called Iraq Procurement: Meet the Buyers. However, one contractor from the Netherlands, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian that his company would not send anybody to Iraq in the present security situation. "There is just no way the board would allow it. We are trying to bid for work that can be done outside Iraq - spare parts, overhead power lines etc. But who on earth would actually want to go there now?" © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (44006)	4/27/2004 8:54:15 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Face the Iraq Fiasco, Senator _________________ by Robert Scheer Columnist The Los Angeles Times Published on Tuesday, April 27, 2004 "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" That was the crucial question Vietnam combat veteran John Kerry put to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 33 years ago, and it is the question that should be at the center of his presidential campaign. Today, however, Kerry seems unable to admit that the war he voted to authorize in Iraq has been such a disaster, arguing only that we must "stay the course." Why, when that was the tragic advice from the best and brightest in the Lyndon Johnson administration? In proposing a long-overdue appeal to the United Nations and NATO to make them real partners in the rebirth of Iraq and take — in his words — the "Made in America" label off what has become a very unpopular occupation, Kerry gets some things right that the president has gotten so wrong. Unfortunately, however, the Democrats' heir apparent is still taking far too much solace in the conventional wisdom, which brought us the sorrows of the Vietnam War. "Americans differ about whether and how we should have gone to war," Kerry said in a national radio address April 17. "But it would be unthinkable now for us to retreat in disarray and leave behind a society deep in strife and dominated by radicals. All Americans are united in backing our troops and meeting our commitment to help the people of Iraq build a country that is stable, peaceful, tolerant and free." Wasn't that our stated goal in Vietnam? The repetition of history here is tragic. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who wrote a searing acknowledgment of the folly of the Vietnam War in his own autobiography, deceived the U.N. last year in support of another ill-fated military adventure in the so-called developing world. We now see a similarly intelligent war veteran, Kerry, seeking to send more troops to a country that he must know, from his own war experience, will not stay pacified. In the birthplace of civilization, we have again run aground on the rocky shoals of nationalism, this time augmented by a religious fervor that increases the danger. As with Vietnam, escalation is not the answer. But an orderly and timely withdrawal is — under U.N. supervision and with the firm goal of leaving Iraq to the Iraqis. Beyond postulating "tactical" solutions in Iraq, like sending our troops more body armor, Kerry needs to take a huge step and acknowledge that his own support of this war was a terrible mistake. Sure, he was lied to repeatedly by a president who told us a year ago under a "Mission Accomplished" banner that "we have defeated an ally of Al Qaeda," when he knew we had done no such thing. But Kerry had all the resources to know what many inside and outside the United States' own family of intelligence agencies were saying long before last year's invasion: Iraq no longer had a nuclear weapons program, had no ties to 9/11 and would be a nightmare to occupy. Although Kerry claims "all Americans" would agree it is "unthinkable" to leave Iraq any time soon, he fails to acknowledge that having more than 100,000 of American troops hunkered down in the Middle East is not a force for stability in the region but rather a lightning rod for violence and chaos. He is even urging the government to send more U.S. troops to Iraq and keep them there until that country, which has little or no history of democracy, is "stable, peaceful, tolerant and free." Such rhetoric may sound good on the stump, but it utterly fails to acknowledge that we have no clue as to how long that would take or how many Americans and Iraqis would die in the experiment. In the Vietnam War, millions died before our hubris was exhausted. In the end, if Kerry is not to become the next Al Gore — triangulating safe positions just this side of a Republican who is probably the most irresponsible American politician in a century — he must challenge President Bush's entire vision, not just his tactics. What Bush is doing in the name of fighting terrorism has nothing to do with making us safer and everything to do with dressing up the grim goals of empire as a grand (and all-too-familiar) experiment in bringing enlightenment to so-called backward people at gunpoint. To have a real choice in this election, we need to hear the voice of that young Navy hero who once warned us that murderous meddling in other countries' affairs will never win the hearts and minds of the people. If Kerry fails to truly confront Bush and is elected, he may find himself answering his own awful question: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" ________________________________ Robert Scheer writes a weekly column for The Times and is coauthor of "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" (Seven Stories Press/Akashic Books, 2003). Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times commondreams.org