'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Funding the occupation of Iraq

The US House and Senate this evening passed different versions of the bills the White House had sent them, authorizing the funding of the US occupation of Iraq (and US operations in Afghanistan) for a further year. It was very significant that in the Senate, 8 Republicans broke party ranks and gave the Dems there a majority for the idea of making half of the $20.3 billion for Iraqi reconstruction into a loan, rather than a grant.

My personal opinion is that if you send your army into someone else's country and bust it up, at the very least you ought to pay outright the costs for the repair of what you did (or, through your criminal lack of advance planning, allowed others to do) there. I think saddling any emerging Iraqi government with a hefty $10 billion of debt is not only mean-spirited but also just plain wrong.

(I also think that in any reconstruction effort, the process ought to be controlled by the Iraqis themselves as much as possible, and the work done by Iraqi companies and Iraqi workers--rather than have Halliburton and Co hauling off the profits from the reconstruction and specially imported migrant workers hauling off the paychecks while Iraqis themselves are out of work... But I guess most of that goes without saying?)

But I guess the good folks from Win Without War, MoveOn, etc., all thought differently, and have been mounting a heavy grassroots phone-in campaign to have people try to persuade their congressional representatives not to give Bush the reconstruction money as an outright grant.

I can see the logic in their position. At a time when 43 million US citizens have no health insurance and schools and bridges throughout this country are crumbling for lack of investment, maybe it does seem inappropriate to "give" huge chunks of US taxpayer money to (re-)build schools, bridges, and hospitals in Iraq....

Well, maybe the folks in the Senate and House should have thought about that before they voted last November to give the Prez a blank check to launch a war against Iraq???

I do recall back in January, when the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice was at the height of the (successful) campaign to have the city council in our cute small city here in central Virginia pass a vote against the launching of any war against Iraq without express UN sanction, I was one of the people who went down to the city council meeting and spoke in favor of the resolution.

Speaking from all my decades of experience of matters Middle Eastern, I explained to the council members that any war would lead to any extremely long-drawn-out and expensive US occupation in Iraq-- and that the money to pay for it would ultimately be shorn from the already-dwindling funds available for social programs inside this country.

And that, sadly, is exactly what's happening now.

So yes, I totally see where Win Without War, MoveOn, etc, are coming from. But I still think that the US "broke" Iraq, so now the US needs to "mend" what it broke...

But then again, there is a big side of me that loves to note how many increasingly significant political defeats the Prez is starting to rack up as the ongoing tragedy of the war erodes his political charisma more and more. Eight Republican Senators voting against him? Wow! This is really getting interesting.