March 28, 2007
Follow the Trail of Hernias?
I plugged this bit into a comment the other day, but then, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it deserved a front row seat. So here it is, from Jim Hightower’s article “Still Passing the Buck” (The Texas Observer, March 9, 2007):
“Meanwhile, there’s the little matter of missing bucks in Iraq. Beaucoup bucks. L. Paul Bremer III, the first overseer of the Iraq operation, now concedes that he OK’d shipping $12 billion from the U.S. Treasury to the Iraqi interim government. In cash. Pallets of shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills were flown to Baghdad. It was 363 tons of cash. Where it all went, no one knows.”
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one wonders if that was the intention.
But we gained something from this loss. Now, we know that $12 billion worth of $100 bills weigh 363 tons, so we should be grateful to Mr. Bremer for authorizing this shipment.
this administration has been nothing if not an object lesson.
So true, Deron. The old shell game. But somehow I don’t think that the people who figured this would be a good idea would even be smart enough to take advantage of it. It’s the razzle-dazzle part of “shock and awe”–but we failed to notice that not everybody in the world is like us in terms of what we value most. There are people out there who would rather die and win than seek personal gain, and that’s our weak spot. Most of the money that fell into the “wrong” hands over there is surely being used against us, and either way, we are “selling the rope that hangs us.”
Couldn’t agree more. I was speaking in the broadest terms with regard to the administration and what can be gained from their reign of terror on a personal level.
I want every person that voted for him to understand what he has done, what his administration has done, the effect on the country and the world.
I have no respect for a person that voted for him and learned nothing from it and I also broaden that to include those who didn’t vote for him in terms of how to confront the evils he represents the next time they show up or even in the form of the various congresspeople who will carry his methods forward.
This seemed too good (or bad) to be true, but here it is in the Guardian too.
Thanks, Joshua, for the article from the Guardian. I think it made me even more angry to see officials actually put forth the argument that this waste of money didn’t matter because it was money derived from Iraqi oil revenues, frozen Iraqi assets, and left over money from the U.N.oil-for-food program. To the extent that this money was necessary to the mission at hand it may as well have been our money, since losing it would mean that we would then have to supply the money again, or fail at the assigned mission because we refuse to do so. And even if the money wasn’t all that necessary to this mission–what about all of the other things it might have been applied to, given that we were clearly in control of its distribution? Just how might a person hold out for “Victory” when forces working against it include public opinion about the squandering of money? Their answer would be: it’s unpatriotic to even read this article, and we are looking into shooting or torturing the people who did this, no matter whose side they are on….