Follow the money . . .

[quade 4]

This will deserve watching. I'm not saying that anything funky is going on, but with all of that money sitting around and just a fraction of it having been spent so far . . . it needs to have some eyes on it.

It's times like this where real corruption starts coming into play -- their's, our's . . .

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/02/money.rebuilding.ap/index.html

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[newsstand 0]

But damn it we are living nicely.

For some Americans in Iraq, isolation feeds ignorance about country
Security concerns and cultural differences leave many Americans in Iraq shut off from the needs and lives of ordinary Iraqis

By Borzou Daragahi

THE STAR-LEDGER

Saturday, July 3, 2004

BAQER AIR BASE, Iraq -- When the U.S. military arrived here in April 2003, this vast military airport -- unused since the 1991 Persian Gulf War -- was a wasteland with mangled gates.

Today the base, renamed Logistical Support Area Anaconda, has become a gleaming replica of American suburbia. There's a first-run movie theater, air-conditioned gym, basketball and racquetball courts, salsa club, indoor swimming pool and avenues lined with air-conditioned trailers for the 21,000 U.S. troops living here.

Despite a few superficial improvements, however, beyond Anaconda's high concrete walls, barbed wire and gun turrets the countryside remains the desolate backwater it was under Saddam Hussein.

Anaconda has become one of the numerous American posts attesting to the vast distance between U.S. personnel in Iraq and ordinary Iraqis, an isolation that has often resulted in American ignorance about Iraq.

"If I can gauge some of the improvements I see every day at LSA Anaconda of the infrastructure of the camp," said Maj. Michael Myslenski, of Brooklyn, Conn., a physician's assistant on the base, "if the same improvements to infrastructure on the outside are occurring, I think they're really going to be in a lot better shape soon."

Certainly, the U.S. military and American authorities can boast of tangible improvements since the fall of Saddam in April 2003.

An Iraqi police force, army and civil defense corps are up and running. Electricity output, destroyed by bombing, has returned to prewar levels. A new currency has been introduced. Hospitals, schools and universities -- looted and gutted in the chaos following the war -- are up and running. Civil liberties, nonexistent under Saddam's rule, are now guaranteed by an interim constitution.

"If you look at the economy, look at essential services and look at Iraq's political transition, you see enormous progress," said Dan Senor, spokesman for former U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer.

But shut off from the needs and lives of ordinary Iraqis, Americans here often sound like politicians addressing swing-state voters back in the United States rather than residents of a country ravaged by decades of dictatorship and war.

Senor, for example, cited free trade and tax rates as two of the "tremendous" accomplishments made here. But few Iraqis bother with taxes, and traders easily circumvent customs duties on Iraq's porous borders.

U.S. officials display ignorance of Iraqi society, history and culture. One U.S. official, speaking at an informal event, cited Iraqi boys and girls attending school together as another example of progress. In fact, Iraq has had coeducational schools for decades.

And the festering insurgency -- the car bombings, roadside explosives, small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar attacks -- directed against U.S. personnel in Iraq has increased the so-called "force-protection" rules for foreigners in Iraq, expanding the distance between Americans and Iraqis.

During a trip outside the heavily guarded "Green Zone" where American officials in Baghdad live and work, one longtime coalition official frantically took pictures with her digital camera. It was the first time she'd ever seen the capital beyond the Green Zone, she said.

Critics of the Bush administration trace many of Iraq's problems -- its crime wave, its incompetent and poorly trained security forces, its stagnant infrastructure improvements -- back to the lack of prewar planning on the part of officials back in Washington.

But many Iraqis and even some within the coalition blame the occupation leadership for failing to grasp Iraqis' daily needs and growing resentment of the occupation, thus fueling the insurgency. Projects to restore essential services were far too late getting off the ground, one U.S. official said, squandering precious goodwill.

For all the goodwill missions -- the medical clinics, the toy handouts, the minor infrastructure improvements -- undertaken by the U.S. military at Anaconda, 40 miles north of Baghdad, its convoys still come under regular military attack and its base continues to face mortar attacks. Recently a mortar landed on one of the camp's stores as soldiers shopped. "It was terrible," said Spc. Ann Shepard. "We saw people all bloody."

"Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

[tunaplanet 0]

It's probably all Bush's fault. Damn him and those evil Republicans!

Forty-two

[quade 4]

Quote

It's probably all Bush's fault. Damn him and those evil Republicans!

Well untimately, yes, for invading to begin with, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'd wager a bag of donuts that at some point in the furture we're going to see some of that money skimmed off. I don't know who's going to do it, but it's too tempting of a target for -everyone- to pass up.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[mikkey 0]

Quote

Quote

It's probably all Bush's fault. Damn him and those evil Republicans!

Well untimately, yes, for invading to begin with, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'd wager a bag of donuts that at some point in the furture we're going to see some of that money skimmed off. I don't know who's going to do it, but it's too tempting of a target for -everyone- to pass up.

Many years ago I was involved in a business working with a number of international aid organisations (infrastructure projects). My experience is that this type of money gets “corrupted” very easily. You will see a lot of very rich Iraqi’s in a few years time. It will be a little like the formation of the new Russian “millionaire class” in the nineties when the state assets got privatised. Big Bucks = Big Corruption.

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When people look like ants - pull. When ants look like people - pray.

[Macumba 0]

Because money is evil.