Geez Kazan, you sound like a Democrat fanboy.
One does not have to be a "Democrat fanboy" to be against Bush's administration.
I mean, "lol":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13297-2004Jun28.html
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The Business of Rebuilding
Immunity Provision Extended for U.S. Firms With Reconstruction Contracts
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A18
U.S. contractors working in Iraq will be exempted from the legal processes of the country's new interim government when they are performing official duties and most reconstruction contracts will continue uninterrupted, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Under an order signed Sunday by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, the contractors' immunity provision covers "official acts that they perform in contracts in support of the Iraq reconstruction effort," said Scott Castle, general counsel for the occupation authority. In matters unrelated to their contract work, they will be subject to Iraqi rules.
lololollfffololmao god damnit
There was horrendous theft & fraud by contractors during the 'rebuilding' period under the US' interim government in Iraq, IIRC. Stuff like billing many times the actual cost, putting stolen items like Iraqi airlines forklifts on expenses, stealing from the vast tonnes of new banknotes shipped in with minimal security post-delivery (soldiers played american football with bags of $100 bills), that sort of thing.
There was a company - Custer Battles - who were hired to replace every dinar note with one without Saddams face. They set up shell companies to vastly inflate costs, invoicing $10m for expenditure costing $3m (including respraying Iraqi Airline forklifts and renting them to the CPA). They actually managed to leave behind a spreadsheet of their fraudulent invoices in a meeting with CPA authorities. The US took no legal action.
Contractors could just - and did - steal and steal and steal without any fear of repercussions; the result is a multi-billion dollar black hole (made even worse by the frantic spending of cash reserves - derived from Iraqi oil - before it could be handed to the Iraqi government; $5bn in the last month with little or no accounting) and a country which produces less electricity, less clean water and less oil than it did before the war in spite of supposedly massive spending.
I remember watching a documentary, filmed partly (for Channel 4; Dispatches: Iraq's Missing Billions) in Iraq by a Baghdad doctor, who went to a supposedly refurbished hospital that had to buy the most basic drugs on the black market and improvise child intensive care incubators (held together by tape and wire, usually shared by multiple children because they only had 14) by placing an air tube directly on the mouth. When you see a baby die (and you did) for lack of equipment that costs mere cents, and be carried home in
a cardboard box because they don't have anything to store the body in you realise the horror that's been visited on that country.
The man put in charge of the reconstruction of the Iraqi health service was James Haveman, a former health administrator from Michigan. He had absolutely no experience of international healthcare, no qualifications for this sort of urgent rebuilding job - but he was an evangelican Christian and had campaigned for Jeb Bush. So he focused on showy, big spends rather than basic health care like clean water, basic drugs, etc. He was interviewed on the aforementioned documentary, and you could tell he was essentially an idiot. Or to be kinder, completely incompetent at that type of (essentially) disaster management. Saddam did more to rebuild the Iraqi service in 6 months after the 1991 Gulf War than has been achieved atall since the last one, and that was in spite of sanctions and Saddam being a ****ing evil nutcase (who used to be our friend, actually - wonder which former UK ally will next be targeted?).
