Heck of a job wingnuts
The New York Times got hold of a 513-page draft report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, and are circulating it around DC. It says what we already know -- that the Bush gang screwed up Iraq big time...that everything they touched there turned to shit or caught fire.
It calls the reconstruction effort “a $100 billion failure.”
"Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.
The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.
By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money."
Do you think we'd be in a recession if we had that money back?
So much damage was done by the invasion, but what was worse was the subsequent looting, which could have been prevented if we'd had enough troops on the ground.
I remember when all that was going on, when all the righties were saying the reason we kept reading stories about things going wrong in Iraq was because journalists were only reporting the bad stuff. Yeah, right.
The report goes on to say how the Pentagon “simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up” failures...also how officials were “operating by the seat of their pants." Get a load of what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said about the potential cost of the reconstruction:
"The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.
“What do you think that’ll cost?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.
“I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,” Mr. Garner said.
“My friend,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/world/middleeast/14reconstruct.html?pagewanted=2&hp
Rummy, Bush and Cheney swallowed Chalabi's con hook, line and sinker -- It was going to be a cheap land grab, and the oil wealth would be theirs.
Oh boy, that Rummy...what a guy. We'll never see another one like him...if we're all very very very very lucky.
