Caltrops - Operation: Hammer Time

Forum Overview :: Operation: Hammer Time

by FoK 04/30/2003, 5:19pm PDT

Lizard_King wrote:

And as I said before, it's just a happy coincidence that Haliburton and Bechtel are slopping up tax dollars like Caligula at a bacchanal.

Who would you suggest fill their roles in Iraq? I know of few companies with the experience Halliburton has in reconstructing damaged oil wells, for example, and in any case we are talking about a contract worth millions in a reconstruction process worth billions.

Are you in the oil well business? No? Then how the fuck would you know?

Getting Iraq's oil fields to pre-1991 production levels will take at least 18 months and cost about $5 billion initially, with $3 billion more in annual operating expenses, according to a recent study by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University

And, in any case, the amount of money isn't the point: the point is that while the outcome may (may) have been positive overall, the motives that our leaders have for attacking were positively corrupt. Overall.

"Since we decided, umm, that there weren't any WMDs after all, what we're thinking is that we, uh, attacked Iraq because of the Reverse Domino Theory. Once Democracy is in the Middle East, all those countries are going to do it!" Aha.

My speculation (and this is just a speculation, I'm not an economist any more than LK is an oil baron) is that democracy, even if it could be administered successfully (which it can't), wouldn't work in Iraq, any better than it's worked in the former Soviet Union. It works great in the U.S. - we are sitting on an embrassment of natural resources here. There are enough different industries that, pretty much, everyone can work here. Iraq, as far as I know, only has one export industry, and it's not going to be privatized (Hell no, then the US wouldn't get its share!). So, how are we expecting that our system will work for them?

FoK