And after all we've done to them!
"Iraq: U.S. has no claim to oil boom"
'America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq,' Baghdad official says.
From chicagotribune.com: BAGHDAD — As Congress gears up to debate the Bush administration's latest request for an additional $108 billion in war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraqis are fuming at suggestions being floated by lawmakers that Baghdad should start paying a share of the war's costs by providing cheap fuel to the U.S. military.
"America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq," said Abdul Basit, the head of Iraq's Supreme Board of Audit, an independent body that oversees Iraqi government spending. "This is an immoral request because we didn't ask them to come to Iraq, and before they came in 2003 we didn't have all these needs.
".... the soaring price of oil is likely to give Iraq a revenue bonanza this year of up to $70 billion, ....why Iraq isn't using its rising oil income to pay more of the costs of reconstruction."[..]
How dare they! Everyone knows that 9/11 was an Iraqi plot, and that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US. Everyone knows it certainly had nothing to do with oil, and everything to do with self-defense, or spreading freedom and democracy......<snort> NOT!
Yeah, I know...the US Congress is asking the people of a country which we have destroyed to pay for that destruction.
How much is the removal of Saddam worth?
But hey, 4,000 lives, $600 billion taxpayer dollars and counting. Just think what we could have done with that money to help our own people. We need to stop spending future money so we can help our war vets.
Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that Iraq has over $30 billion squirreled away in US banks, collecting interest, and it could reap an additional $100 billion in oil profits from 2007 and 2008.
So, they've got a surplus, while we're running a deficit. Why should we continue to pick up the tab for reconstruction?
Let the Iraqis squander and steal their own money for a change.
I heard on TV that our troops in Iraq have to buy gas on the open market, paying $3.23 a gallon that they've sacrificed their lives to help deliver. Which means the Pentagon's spending $153 million a month in Iraq on fuel alone.
Besides, there is no war in Iraq, there is only an occupation of Iraq by US troops. How do you win an occupation? We have to find a reason to declare ourselves unnecessary and leave.
