dr_mabeuse
seduce the mind
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2002
- Posts
- 11,528
A US government intelligence report on Iraq now claims that there’s a high possibility of an outright civil war before we ever get to the scheduled January elections, which now look like they’re going to be post-poned (this is just what happened in South Viet Nam, which never held a single election while the Americans were in control because we knew who would win.). Some critics are claiming that a state of civil war already exists, given the most recent upsurge in violence and with at least half a dozen major Iraqi cities being designated as “No-go” zones by the US military because they’re under the control of insurgents.
Whether you buy the excuses for the invasion or not, there’s little doubt that the handling of post-war Iraq has been a total fiasco, though it hasn't received much analysis in the press. How we managed to bungle it so completely is the subject of an excellent article in the New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17406) by Peter Galbraith, the career diplomat who arranged the Bosnia settlement. Skip Part 1 (it’s all about Alawi, the current president) and go down to the real story. Here’s an excerpt.:
-------------------------------------------
The privatizing of Iraq's economy was handled at first by Thomas Foley, a top Bush fund-raiser, and then by Michael Fleisher, brother of President Bush's first press secretary. After explaining that he had got the job in Iraq through his brother Ari, he told the Chicago Tribune—without any apparent sense of irony—that the Americans were going to teach the Iraqis a new way of doing business. "The only paradigm they know is cronyism."
Haveman, according to the Tribune, ignored Iraq's private health care system (which meets half the country's needs) and wasted huge amounts of money by refusing to collect data on the existing clinics. It is probably just as well that Iraq's privatization program has not worked out, since the CPA could not, as the agent of an occupying power, lawfully sell any Iraqi assets, although it is unlikely that Fleisher or Foley knew this.
US spending in Iraq has been slow and misdirected. Politically connected corporations, such as Vice President Cheney's Halliburton, received "no bid" contracts and have been accused of bilking the government with tens of millions in overcharges. But don't expect politically embarrassing investigations. The CPA's inspector general is Stuart Bowen Jr., a longtime Bush aide, who came to the position from the Washington lobbying firm of Patten Boggs. Among the contracts he is supposed to monitor is one for URS, a client whose $30 million contract he helped obtain. The US failure to meet the basic needs of ordinary people in postwar Iraq is the major reason so many Iraqis feel so bitterly angry with the occupation. The failure was not a matter of money. From the start the CPA had access to more than $1 billion in cash left behind by Saddam's regime and $4 billion in UN oil-for-food funds earmarked for Kurdistan, but redirected (to the great anger of the Kurds) to a CPA-controlled budget. In October 2003, the US Congress appropriated $19 billion for Iraq reconstruction. The CPA also controlled revenues from Iraqi oil exports, which were, in spite of periodic sabotage, very substantial.
Eight months after receiving the congressional appropriation, however, the CPA had spent less than $500 million of it on reconstruction. The only part of Iraq not subject to the CPA's financial control was Kurdistan, where the regional government received a cash allocation equal to just 6 percent of Iraq's total budget (on a per capita basis it should have received 15 percent), but spent it so effectively that the local economy has enjoyed a boom that, in some areas, outstripped the local labor market. By contrast, unemployoment in Arab Iraq has hovered around 50 percent. The hiring of unqualified staff by the CPA, documented by the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post, helps to explain why the CPA (known to my Iraqi friends as "Cannot Provide Anything") accomplished so little…
-----------------------------
---dr.M.
Whether you buy the excuses for the invasion or not, there’s little doubt that the handling of post-war Iraq has been a total fiasco, though it hasn't received much analysis in the press. How we managed to bungle it so completely is the subject of an excellent article in the New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17406) by Peter Galbraith, the career diplomat who arranged the Bosnia settlement. Skip Part 1 (it’s all about Alawi, the current president) and go down to the real story. Here’s an excerpt.:
-------------------------------------------
The privatizing of Iraq's economy was handled at first by Thomas Foley, a top Bush fund-raiser, and then by Michael Fleisher, brother of President Bush's first press secretary. After explaining that he had got the job in Iraq through his brother Ari, he told the Chicago Tribune—without any apparent sense of irony—that the Americans were going to teach the Iraqis a new way of doing business. "The only paradigm they know is cronyism."
Haveman, according to the Tribune, ignored Iraq's private health care system (which meets half the country's needs) and wasted huge amounts of money by refusing to collect data on the existing clinics. It is probably just as well that Iraq's privatization program has not worked out, since the CPA could not, as the agent of an occupying power, lawfully sell any Iraqi assets, although it is unlikely that Fleisher or Foley knew this.
US spending in Iraq has been slow and misdirected. Politically connected corporations, such as Vice President Cheney's Halliburton, received "no bid" contracts and have been accused of bilking the government with tens of millions in overcharges. But don't expect politically embarrassing investigations. The CPA's inspector general is Stuart Bowen Jr., a longtime Bush aide, who came to the position from the Washington lobbying firm of Patten Boggs. Among the contracts he is supposed to monitor is one for URS, a client whose $30 million contract he helped obtain. The US failure to meet the basic needs of ordinary people in postwar Iraq is the major reason so many Iraqis feel so bitterly angry with the occupation. The failure was not a matter of money. From the start the CPA had access to more than $1 billion in cash left behind by Saddam's regime and $4 billion in UN oil-for-food funds earmarked for Kurdistan, but redirected (to the great anger of the Kurds) to a CPA-controlled budget. In October 2003, the US Congress appropriated $19 billion for Iraq reconstruction. The CPA also controlled revenues from Iraqi oil exports, which were, in spite of periodic sabotage, very substantial.
Eight months after receiving the congressional appropriation, however, the CPA had spent less than $500 million of it on reconstruction. The only part of Iraq not subject to the CPA's financial control was Kurdistan, where the regional government received a cash allocation equal to just 6 percent of Iraq's total budget (on a per capita basis it should have received 15 percent), but spent it so effectively that the local economy has enjoyed a boom that, in some areas, outstripped the local labor market. By contrast, unemployoment in Arab Iraq has hovered around 50 percent. The hiring of unqualified staff by the CPA, documented by the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post, helps to explain why the CPA (known to my Iraqi friends as "Cannot Provide Anything") accomplished so little…
-----------------------------
---dr.M.
