The Washington Post's Al Kamen pretends to laugh, but is really banging his head against the wall:
Posted by DeLong at September 10, 2003 02:37 PM | TrackBackFeith-Based Initiative (washingtonpost.com): ...We've come across a most timely announcement from the highly regarded international corporate and commercial law firm of Zell, Goldberg & Co. The firm "has recently established a task force dealing with issues and opportunities relating to the recently ended war with Iraq," its Web site announced.... Interested parties can reach the law firm through its Web site, at www.fandz.com. Fandz.com?... that was the Web site of the Washington law firm of Feith & Zell, P.C., as in Douglas J. Feith... undersecretary of defense for policy and head of -- what else? -- reconstruction matters in Iraq. It would be impossible indeed to overestimate how perfect ZGC would be in "assisting American companies in their relations with the United States government in connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects."
That $87 billion request for Iraq is making former Bush White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey look brilliant. Lindsey... estimated last September in the Wall Street Journal that the effort in Iraq could cost between $100 billion and $200 billion.... Lindsey was dispatched to the doghouse for the next three months after that and then... shown the door. With the total cost now at about $150 billion, Lindsey's prescience is stunning. Maybe his people will even stop insisting that the Journal misquoted him.
Condoleezza Rice's straightforward admission yesterday of a mistake in Iraq planning was indeed stunning. And what was that error? ". . . it was how really awful Saddam Hussein was to his own people".... Nah. Really? They didn't know how bad Saddam was? Yes, it's true, they didn't. "[W]hen you look at an infrastructure that looked gleaming, if you looked at pictures of Baghdad -- but when you think about it, it was pictures of presidential palaces -- and you look instead at the living conditions of people in Basra or in Sadr City; if you look at the fact that the electrical power grid was serving really only 50 percent of the country; if you look at the fact that there were large parts of the country with no sewage..." Didn't we have some "assets" in Iraq who might have told us a little something about the U.N. embargo and living conditions? Maybe a CIA type or two?
I find it amazing, though well within character, for the administration to claim surprise at the poor condition of Iraq.
In the fall of 2002 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published a widely reported study of the potential costs of the war, occupation, and reconstruction.
http://www.amacad.org/publications/monographs/War_with_Iraq.pdf
It includes an estimate that the 1991 war destroyed $230 billion of Iraq infrastructure and the sanctions cost at least another $150 billion in lost economy. This can be found on page 53 of the study, as well as the following.
"Overall, the wars and sanctions during the Saddam regime probably cost Iraq in the order of two decades of GDP in lost output, capital, and financial resources. There are no parallels in modern history to economic devastation on that scale."
How could anyone not expect the place to be severely run down?
Maybe Ms Rice could take a tour of Watts, the south side of Chicago or parts of Oakland or look at large parts of rural America where there is inadequate sewage that dumps into surface water. She could make a similar claim about America.
Posted by: bakho on September 10, 2003 08:13 PMWelcome to surreality, as a friend of mine puts it. I know I am stuck in repeat mode but if W and co. can have something like a majority of Americans believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, it should be no problem for them having gullible and un/desinformed folks believe that Iraq was run down because of Saddam.
It's easy to conclude that Bush and co. are a bunch of incompetent idiots when it comes to managing reality. But, as far as managing to make many in this country live in a parallel reality, one has to honestly acknowledge that they are pure geniuses (but then again so were the Nazis - and I acknowledge that this comparison is an relatively wild exaggeration).
My hope has always come from the fact that reality has this annoying tendency to catch up with myths... But that doesn't mean that the "mystifiers” will change their tune: Back to surreality, by the time this message will actually post to this comment section, the guys who failed to protect this country from the 9-11-2001 attacks will probably enjoy at least a bit of renewed support and popularity. Which, of course, they will run to spend on curtailing civil liberties since "they attacked us because they hate our freedom."*
Anyway, most peaceful wishes of democracy cum liberty et prosperity (in alphabetical order) on this upcoming day of remembrance.
*(C) Karl Rove for Bush and co., September 2001.
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns on September 10, 2003 08:34 PM