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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Somehow I get the feeling that the Bush/McCain/Lieberman agenda in Iraq isn't about "winning"
Posted by Jill | 6:54 AM
...at least not in the military victory sense.

The Iraq war has been a bonanza for military contractors. From Halliburton and its many subsidiaries to Dyncorp to Bechtel, some of the most heinous corporations in the United States have turned Iraq into a cash cow, using OUR money -- money that could have been spent on education, infrastructure, research into alternative fuels, medical research, providing universal health insurance, or perhaps even fighting the REAL battle against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Instead, proving on an even more massive scale what I said back in 1988 when I posited that the Bush family regards the entire country as a private fiefdom for itself and its friends, the Bush/Cheney administration has bankrupted the country for generations to come shoveling cash into the pockets of these corporations.

And this is what we got for our so-called "investment":

The U.S. government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.

The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion and left the region near civil war.

"The security situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, hindering progress in all reconstruction sectors and threatening the overall reconstruction effort," according to the 579-page report, which was being released Wednesday.

Calling Iraq's sectarian violence the greatest challenge, Bowen said in a telephone interview that billions in U.S. aid spent on strengthening security has had limited effect. Reconstruction now will fall largely on Iraqis to manage — and they're nowhere ready for the task.

The audit comes as President Bush is pressing Congress to approve $1.2 billion in new reconstruction aid as part of his broader plan to stabilize Iraq by sending 21,500 more U.S. troops to Baghdad and Anbar province.

[snip]

According to the report, the State Department paid $43.8 million to contractor DynCorp International for the residential camp for police training personnel outside of Baghdad's Adnan Palace grounds that has stood empty for months. About $4.2 million of the money was improperly spent on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool, all ordered by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior but never authorized by the U.S.

U.S. officials spent another $36.4 million for weapons such as armored vehicles, body armor and communications equipment that can't be accounted for. DynCorp also may have prematurely billed $18 million in other potentially unjustified costs, the report said.

Bowen, whose office was nearly eliminated last month by administration-friendly Republicans in Congress, called spending waste in Iraq a continuing problem. Corruption is high among Iraqi officials, while U.S. contract management remains somewhat weak.

With America's $21 billion rebuilding effort largely finished, it will be up to the international community and the Iraqis to step up its dollars to sustain reconstruction, Bowen said in the interview. "That will be a long-term and very expensive process," he said.

According to the report:

_Major U.S. contractors in Iraq, including Bechtel National and Kellogg, Brown and Root Services Inc., said they devoted an average 12.5 percent of their total expenses for security.

_Bowen's office opened 27 new criminal probes in the last quarter, bringing the total number of active cases to 78. Twenty-three are awaiting prosecutorial action by the Justice Department, most of them centering on charges of bribery and kickbacks.


Meanwhile, John McCain, who has completely lost his mind and thinks he's back in 1972 and he is the only person standing between victory and loss in Vietnam, along with Joe Lieberman, who seems to think that nuclear war in the Middle East somehow benefits Israel, and Lindsey Graham, are committed to propping up this failed presidency by continuing to fund this war in perpetuity, no matter how many American kids have to die to do it.

And what of those American kids? Remember the opening scene in Three Kings, in which Mark Wahlberg says, "Are we shooting people, or what?" That was fiction. This is the real-life mirror image of that scene:

"Who the hell is shooting at us?" a US soldier yelled last week. His platoon was in a strife-torn part of Baghdad, teamed with an Iraqi Army unit. Gunfire was coming from all directions. "Who's shooting at us? Do we know who they are?"


Those of you who were alive during the Vietnam era just felt a chill, didn't you? Because we have all been here before. The ghosts of Vietnam hover over this war like the crazy aunt in the attic about whom no one wants to talk. Vietnam wasn't lost due to a lack of will; it was lost because we had no business being there in the first place. Putting the generations to come into debt to China in perpetuity to pay for another escalation of another senseless war will not change history in Vietnam, nor will it prevent a similar outcome in Iraq. It will, however, make a whole lot of Bush/Cheney contributors, as well as the Vice President himself, even wealthier than they are now.

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