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| Uh oh: Rall on Iraq by Zebco Fuckface 02/05/2003, 11:54pm PST | ||||
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| So what if Bush isn't going to rebuild Iraq with a democracy post-war? What if he leaves the country to rot in anarchy?
What America did with its first Bush-era colony should give pause to those inclined to believe its promises to do well by a post-Saddam Iraq. Experts estimated that a true Marshall Plan for Afghanistan--occupation forces to enforce law and order, creating a real government, construction of basic infrastructure--would have required at least 250,000 permanently stationed American troops and $25 billion spent over five years. Afghan President (more accurately, Mayor of Kabul) Hamid Karzai puts the cost at $45 billion over 10 years. Instead of a U.S.-led attempt to rebuild, Afghanistan got five percent of a Marshall Plan and a country allowed to disintegrate into the 1995-style warlordism that caused Afghans to turn to the Taliban in the first place. "The U.S. is still giving Afghanistan roughly $300 million per year," says a disappointed former National Security Council Member Robert Orr. "That is nothing close to what the U.S. did for Europe during the Marshall Plan." No roads have been paved, no wells have been dug, no electricity has been rigged. The total U.S. force in Afghanistan is 8,000, all stationed in Karzai's Kabul city-state. Even in Kabul, the New York Times reports, the U.S. hasn't built a single house. Karzai can't pay his own staff. As I witnessed in Takhar and Kunduz Provinces in November and December of 2001, the collapse of the Taliban created a power vacuum that was immediately, and remains to this day, filled by the same regional, warlord-financed militias that terrorized Afghans before 1996. Around Mazar-e-Sharif, for example, the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum's forces have set up roadblocks where anyone who passes [can be] robbed, raped, or killed at the whim of AK-47-toting teenagers. Individual "commanders" have further subdivided the area into minute districts so that it's impossible to get around without paying them off. I don't know what the hell to think now. This is the weak point in the liberal argument for the war. |
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Uh oh: Rall on Iraq by 02/05/2003, 11:54pm PST  Re: Uh oh: Rall on Iraq by 02/05/2003, 11:54pm PST The Ironic Thing Is.... by 02/06/2003, 6:57am PST Re: The Ironic Thing Is.... by 02/06/2003, 8:20pm PST Counterpoint! by 02/06/2003, 7:14am PST I'm down with this by 02/06/2003, 11:30am PST |
