Quote:
Is the tuition that you pay for your "middle east studies", reasonable or more burdensome, and do you ever "Picture yourself on a boat on a river With tangerine trees and marmalade skies"....I suspect that the name of that river is "denial"....
It is the corrupt US administration and it's political party that "killed Iraq", Seaver, and they've already unsuccessfully tried to "shoot the messenger", their own Stuart Bowen Jr.
|
Host, you of all people should never throw out the denial sticker. I could dig out many posts of yours which more than deserve it, but I give you more respect than that.
Quote:
|
host: I didn't see a single word in Seaver's post about dismissal. To me, it read more like an explanation or a way to begin to understand the magnitude of the problem. That's vastly different.
|
The problem sits on both sides of the fence. What I was pointing out is we can't simply look through books and see where every dollar went.
We are following the method which has been used in the region for the past couple-hundred years. Even Saddam just accepted and respected the tradition of corruption. During the Iran/Iraq War Saddam awarded $X for every person a tribal chief supplied to the war. They knew damn well they were paying for soldiers who either didn't exist or were still at home, it was simply accepted as a reward for compliance. Saddam granted huge construction projects afterwards for his palaces, in which he was fully aware he was being charged for items that were never used or even existed, it was simply the culture.
Do you believe that we ship professional Americans to repair the electrical lines? No, we have maybe one manager and rely on the Iraqis. The corruption is guaranteed in situations like this, as to keep the good will of the tribal chiefs we pay a little more.
You said Will that they still don't have power. Well think of it, how hard is it really to pull power in your neighborhood? You shoot one transformer and entire blocks go out. You throw a $2 metal chain over the electrical lines, and then snipe workers who come to repair it. This is a huge problem which does not corrolate to how fast our repair technicians can get power up after a storm.
I'm not talking about the oil fields, in which Haliburton is the ONLY company which could pull it off in the first place. They have no-bid contracts because no other company in the world (aside from a French owned one.. yeah right) is suited for such massive undertakings. There's a reason why Haliburton was awarded no-bid contracts under Clinton for Yugoslavia, Somalia, etc. They are the ones who can pull it off.