"It is inexcusable for U.S. taxpayers to continue to foot the bill for projects the Iraqis are fully capable of funding themselves. We should not be paying for Iraqi projects, while Iraqi oil revenues continue to pile up in the bank." [NY Times, 8/6/08]We are basically rebuilding their country as ours falls apart, while they sit on a pile of treasure accumulated by selling us $4 a gallon gas. This will surely re-ignite the debate regarding whether or not the Iraqis really need our assistance, or rather are relying on us to foot the bill while they fight amongst themselves. My crystal ball predicts that Obama will be talking tomorrow about what we could do with $80 billion on this side of the world.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Can we get some of that over here?!
The New York Times is reporting that the Iraqi government will have accumulated a nearly $80 billion budget surplus by year's end, driven primarily by petroleum exports. This has already elicited bipartisan shock and outrage, considering the fact that we are outspending the Iraqis almost six to one on post-war reconstruction. Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner summed it up nicely:
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4 comments:
Fear of working at Burger King, eh?
Like the DNC, who engineered his rapid ascendancy from junior Senator from Illinois to "beacon of hope" Presidential candidate, Barack Obama is fully committed to the perpetuation of a system that is deliberately structured to siphon the remainder of the commonly held wealth of this nation into the privately held accounts of the handful of plutocrats who direct the actions of both the RNC and DNC, and therefore, indirectly, of their respective puppet candidates.
So committed, it is unlikely he will question the wisdom of this particular transfer of capital, since very little of it, in fact, is actually being used in reconstruction efforts.
But doesn't Obama's pledge to withdraw forces from Iraq suggest he is willing to halt flow of tax dollars into the coffers of contractors like KBR and Bechel? Or do you think that his pledge is fraudulent, and he would simply redirect "reconstruction" contracts into the hands of Democratically-aligned firms?
In fact, I do believe his pledge to be duplicitous, given that the military bases that have been constructed there by American contractors are permanent, not temporary, in design, and the Senator either supported or made no effort to block the funds allocated by Congress to build them.
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