Corporations Cutting and Running From Iraq
Corporations are starting to run from Iraq
Reconstruction failure, Bechtel, is quitting Iraq. Its contract is over, though incomplete because Bechtel has not been held accountable. Some 2.3 billion (with a B) dollars down the drain. The Iraqi's are worse off then they were under Saddam. Six hours a day of electricity if they are lucky. Grossly inadequate supplies of potable water. More from Paul Krugman
Kroll, a Manhattan based security firm, has decided that Iraq and Afghanistan are too dangerous, and not worth the risk to their personnel.
If the corporate contingent is leaving Iraq because it is becoming too hazardous, or there is not enough money to be stolen, then can the rest of the US be far behind. Let us hope not.
PNAC Iraq planners now cutting and running
It appears that the PNAC group that started planing the Iraq invasion long before the 2000 elections is starting to cut and run from any responsibility. Perle and others deny that they had any significant part, blame Bush and others for their incompetence.
From Vanity Fair:
New York, N.Y., November 3, 2006 — A group of neoconservatives led by former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee Richard Perle and former Pentagon insider Kenneth Adelman tell Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose that they blame the “dysfunctional” Bush administration for the “disaster” in Iraq and say that if they had it to do over again they would not advocate an invasion of Iraq.
Perle tells Rose that, “at the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.... I don’t think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.... [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him.”
Adelman tells Rose that when he wrote in 2002 that “liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,” he “just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”
You can read the rest of this abstract at Vanity Fair (full article to be published in December) Neo Culpa
When one of the most rabid NeoCONs...
...calls your handling of the Iraq war dysfunctional, well, that's saying something!
Especially since I think Richard Perle's ideology makes Dick Cheney's look like a boy scout.
Another conservative publication turns on the misAdministration -- article here
Cutting the accounting oversight in Iraq
It would seem that Congress would want to know what's happening to that money flowing to Iraq, right? This from the New York Times:
"The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his (Stuart W. Bowen Jr.) federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03reconstruct.html?_r...