Retooling Iraq
Hey, it’s not all doom and gloom coming out of the Middle East. Take a look at this:
Iraq is fast becoming one of the United States’ top customers for military sales. Since January 2007, Iraq has spent $3.1 billion on U.S. weapons. That number looks likely to grow exponentially as Iraq uses its vast unspent reserves of petrodollars to develop its army into a force capable of defending its borders against hostile neighbors.
In the past two months alone, the Pentagon has alerted Congress of a possible $8.7 billion worth of additional military sales to Iraq, for everything from lightweight attack helicopters to armored ambulances to binoculars.
There’s a friendly pimp who can guarantee you the best whores. A slick hustler always working the angles. He’s got the best girls. You don’t need to look anywhere else, man. Those other girls? They’re not clean. It’s his you want. Think of Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver telling you where you can put your missile.
Still, a good news story or what? Iraq might have some of the worst living and health standards in the world right now but, boy, are they going to be tooled up. I wonder what the mark-up is on a pair of US military-issue binoculars. Don’t shop for it, Pentagon it!
You know what I’d get me with all that cash if I was Prime Minister of Iraq? A WMD programme. I’d get me some mobile laboratories, maybe some VX gas rockets. Then I’d let slip some ambiguous remark dissing Israel. You know, just for a laugh.
Posted on August 20th, 2008 at 8:33 am
| See also • ReliefWeb: Iraq health update - Summer 2005 • Reuters: Man held as terrorism suspect over punk song • Future War |
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There’s an interesting article in Prospect this month, suggesting that a fraction of Iraq’s reconstruction revenue should be spent building cinemas and funding a film school or two. Since the US pretty much invented the cinema, its likely that the contracts to build such things, and to supply such equipment, would go to US firms too, so its not as if it would mean a loss of petrodollars or anything. A better sort of ’shooting’ I thought…
Cinemas? Movies? Are you mad? Everybody knows movies cause violence. Before you knew it, the Iraqis would be shooting each other in the streets.
My country is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an illegal and unAmerican war to force a puppet regime in Iraq to spend billions on buying weapons it can’t use from war profiteers. Are we all stuck in a Joseph Heller novel?
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It would indeed be hard to make it up. Very very sad. Long live the military industrial complex (and Hollywood on the Euphrates).
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