Hasn’t the war just gone amazingly

LOL – Hey remember all those right wingers who wanted us to get into Iraq? HAHAHAH, and remember how National and ACT wanted us to be in what amounts to the pack rape of Iraq because our ‘mates are going’ – no surprise that so many former cops went on to be National Party MPs is there?

I love how so many right wing voices only now quietly mutter what a great war this has turned out to be, no great apology from Kiwi Blog, no great climb down from ZB or Radio Live or Radio Pacific or the Herald, just quiet sweeps under the media carpet.

Well I don’t do sweeping under the carpet – here’s another great story from our beloved war for freedom and democracy from Iraq – proof that on top of the out right corruption of the virtual pillage of Iraqi resources comes news of jaw dropping incompetence. Electricity and oil and water supplies are now WORSE than when they were under Saddam. WORSE! Laugh with me folks, 655 000 Iraqis who are dead are, they are laughing and laughing and laughing. Of course they are dead, so the sound is a bit muffled coming from the grave, but shouldn’t we feel proud of the achievement towards democracy and freedom that Amerika has helped build.

Now here’s what I don’t want to hear – I don’t want to hear ‘but why us’ when some angry Muslim straps a bomb to themselves and detonates it in a Western capital.

Sabotage and scandal eat billions to rebuild Iraq
Even John Bolton, the neocon's neocon and former United States ambassador to the UN, now admits it. Mistakes were made in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Not regime change - he is unrepentant about that - but what happened next. Some US$21 billion ($29.3 billion) in US reconstruction funds later, and despite President Bush's promises that the US would leave Iraq with a better infrastructure, the country produces less electricity and oil than it did before the invasion four years ago, according to the US special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction (Sigir). Others go further than Bolton: it could never have gone to plan because there was no credible plan to reconstruct the country. Andy Bearpark, who worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran the country for a year after the war, says: "The problem was fatally flawed planning, that was then completely overtaken by the collapse of the security situation. The CPA drew up plans in the Baghdad green zone with little appreciation of practicalities out in the country." There have been scandals aplenty in the aftermath of the war. Barely had hostilities begun when it was revealed that contracts to rebuild the country's infrastructure were being handed out without competition to companies such as Bechtel and the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root, both of which had close ties to the Bush Administration. Rosemary Hollis, head of research at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, says: "It is scandalous that what little infrastructure there was before the war was not salvaged and that reconstruction has been so poorly planned." Bearpark adds: "The real scandal is that the output from the money that has been spent on reconstruction is only a fraction of what the Iraqi people had a right to expect."