Friday, December 12, 2003
Reading through the blogs that Patrick links to over at his blog unsurprisingly most of them are gleeful at Bush refusing to allow countries that opposed the war in Iraq to bid for contracts to rebuild it. I haven't summoned up any enthusiasm to be outraged yet, I'm sure that there must be some half-competent engineering companies in the Allied countries, it's just whether or not they'll get a look in or whether despite contracts being open to a wider range of people it's still going to go to Bush's mates.
I'm not too keen on this 'the Allies blew it up, so only the Allies should get to rebuild it' argument though. One group of Allies did the damage, they personally aren't going to gain anything from the money spent on rebuilding Iraq. How many of the families of those that have died in Iraq are involved in reconstruction companies that could bid for jobs in Iraq? It's one of those claims that doesn't really mean anything when you look at it. Why chose the abritrary distinction of statehood? Why not insist that only people called Brian should be able to benefit from this money?
I'm not too keen on this 'the Allies blew it up, so only the Allies should get to rebuild it' argument though. One group of Allies did the damage, they personally aren't going to gain anything from the money spent on rebuilding Iraq. How many of the families of those that have died in Iraq are involved in reconstruction companies that could bid for jobs in Iraq? It's one of those claims that doesn't really mean anything when you look at it. Why chose the abritrary distinction of statehood? Why not insist that only people called Brian should be able to benefit from this money?
