Wow. When I read this story from Baghdad Burning I was pretty well shocked. Not surprised, but shocked. Now, I do take it with a grain of salt, as I do pretty much everything I read on this here interweb thingy, but still, even if the numbers are cut in half, or doubled either way….
First of all, go read it for yourself. River, a very cool girl blogging in Baghdad is an excellent writer and is getting as much fame as Salam Pax. The short story can be cut down into a couple of quick points:
- Iraq is not some backwoods hickville.
- Re-building is having to happen because there was something there before.
- One of her cousins has spent 17 years in bridges and structural engineering and has had a hand in rebuilding many of the bridges destroyed by the first Gulf War.
- He estimated $300,000 to rebuild a bridge damaged by bombing.
- The US company that got the contract estimated the cost at over 150x the original estimate.
The story has to be read for the full impact, but as Firefly so delicately put it “No, they’re not lining their pockets!”
Aren’t their rules against this sort of thing? I mean, that’s just stupid. Wonder what the American taxpayers who are being told it’ll cost something like $90,000,000,000 to rebuild Iraq would think of this? Would they care, or call it good business sense or something?
Again, read the whole thing. I’d paste it here, but Doc Sears already did that.