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Some Nuggets

Today there is an article in the New York Times about the price of gas in Iraq and the fact that Brown & Root seems to be charging twice as much to bring it into the country than other people. Old news really. Much more interesting are a couple of nuggets buried inside the story:

"The price of fuel sold in Iraq, set by the government, is 5 cents to 15 cents a gallon. The price is a political issue, and has not been raised to avoid another hardship for Iraqis."

The price is set by "the government"? Oh really? What government would we be talking about here? There is no "government" in Iraq - there was, but we took care of that. I wonder if this line was fed to the author? Of course we can't raise the price of fuel for Iraqi citizens, but we also can't use it as an excuse for the fact that Halliburton is making money in this situation.

But this is the more interesting quote to me:

"Although Iraq sits on the third-largest oil reserves in the world, production has been hampered by pipeline sabotage, power failures and an antiquated infrastructure that was hurt by 11 years of United Nations sanctions."

I have read as much news about Iraq as I can cram into my head, and as far as I can tell (without fact checking) this has to be one of the first admissions in a major news source that the country was in the crapper from the get-go (which should have been obvious to any arm chair observer). I was appalled at Condoleezza Rice's faux shock about the state of the infrastructure after we marched to Baghdad and had taken over.

Some things just don't fly - and the fact that the US totally ingnored any semblance of facts, of common sense, in the post conflict planning, is just astounding and to me borders on criminal. We shoud have had plans (at least) for all of this. We should have reached out to the Oil Ministry and others, and to neighboring nations, way before the first bombs dropped. Maybe if the Iraqi's were more involved from the begining there wouldn't have been so much sabotage to the refineries and pipe lines. Maybe if you could have showed them the profits things would be a lot better.

There has to be a point where people get tired of this kind of stuff. Why anyone is making money off of this situation is dead wrong. Why isn't the Army Corp Of Engineers just doing it at cost? If Halliburton is complaining about the dangers, then why the fuck are they there? To MAKE MONEY. The right wants to privatize everything but your privacy - war, education, energy, health care. Everything can be farmed out, off the government books (yet we are still broke!). But you just better not be sleeping with a dog (or anyone or anything else that isn't your opposite sex and your same color) or Senator Santorum will be on the watch. Something is rotten in the State of America. Things have to change.

Posted by afinta at December 10, 2003 08:19 AM