I COULD not get past this sentence in Paul Wolfowitz's dishonest op-ed piece: "Electricity reached pre-war levels last October, and is on track to reach 150 percent of pre-war levels, despite an infrastructure devastated by Saddam." What? Saddam bombed the electric power plants? Oh, no. It's the U.S., spurred by Wolfowitz, that destroyed civilian power plants. It is the U.S. Government, spurred by Wolfowitz, that spent a decade encircling and starving Iraq, and preventing Iraq from rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed by the LAST Gulf War. Saddam didn't devastate Iraq's infrastructure. Wolfowitz did.
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If Wolfowitz believes that what he and his ilk caused the U.S. to do was morally defensible, he should take credit for that devastation, not blame Saddam for what the United States did. But he doesn't take credit, does he? He knows the phrase should have been "an infrastructure devastated by the U.S.", but he knows it was wrong to devastate the civilian infrastructure that we are now merely rebuilding, at huge cost.
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Far from devastating Iraq, Saddam performed nearly a miracle in rebuilding the country despite a stringent embargo imposed on the nation. He rebuilt the bridges, reopened the power plants and TV stations, repaired the highways and hospitals and much of the rest of the devastation the U.S. caused in Gulf War I. Saddam may have been a very bad man, but he did a terrific job of rebuilding under a very difficult embargo situation.
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It is the second war that devastated Iraq's infrastructure AGAIN, which is why it took months of pouring in billions of dollars from abroad to get Iraq to "pre-war levels". It will take further years to rebuild what can be rebuilt. But what we never hear is what cannot be rebuilt: the lives snuffed out by U.S. Government violence. We hear only how many Iraqis Saddam killed. Let's be evenhanded and tell the American people how many Iraqis the United States has killed -- and continues to kill. Why has no tally ever been rendered? (Responsive to "Terror Is Losing", 3/19/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:20 PM