Withdrawal from Iraq

[struggle4progress]

What did we do wrong in Vietnam? We 'pulled out'! Not a very manly thing to do. No. When you're fucking people, you're supposed to stay with it and fuck them good; fuck them to death; hang in there and keep fucking them until they're all fucking dead. But in Vietnam what happened was by accident we left a few women and children alive, and we haven't felt good about ourselves since. That's why in the Persian Gulf, George Bush had to say, 'This will not be another Vietnam.' He actually said, 'this time we're going all the way.' Imagine. An American president using the sexual slang of a thirteen-year-old to describe his foreign policy. - George Carlin http://utah.indymedia.org/news/2005/06/11006.php

Funds Fade, Deaths Rise as Iraq Rebuilding Lags
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: October 31, 2005

As the money runs out on the $30 billion American-financed reconstruction of Iraq, the officials in charge cannot say how many planned projects they will complete, and there is no clear source for hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to operate the projects that have been finished, according to a report to Congress released yesterday.

The report, by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, describes some progress but also an array of projects that have gone awry, sometimes astonishingly, like electrical substations that were built at great cost but never connected to the country's electrical grid. <snip>

Those death and injury tolls, which in the chaos of Iraq are probably underreported to begin with, especially among Iraqi contractors, have come about even though more than a quarter of the reconstruction money has actually "been spent on security costs related to the insurgency," the report says. <snip>

The inspector general found that $7.3 million was mismanaged and $1.3 million entirely wasted through duplicate work and buying overpriced equipment in the construction of a police academy in the city of Babylon, south of Baghdad. Similarly, $1.8 million was paid in advance for work that was not performed during the rehabilitation of a library in the city of Karbala, which is holy to Shiites.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/international/middleeast/31reconstruct.html?ex=1132722000&en=2729720b010022e7&ei=5070&hp&ex=1130821200&en=0a89caee408b8a78&ei=5094&partner=homepage