Thanks. In the mean time, I found an AP dispatch about Kucinich's Santa Fe talk:
***** The Associated Press State & Local Wire July 3, 2003, Thursday, BC cycle 4:05 AM Eastern Time SECTION: State and Regional LENGTH: 483 words HEADLINE: U.S. must rebuild Iraq, Kucinich says BYLINE: By DEBORAH BAKER, Associated Press Writer DATELINE: SANTA FE
BODY: The United States must rebuild Iraq but should make way in the meantime for United Nations peacekeeping forces, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said.
An opponent of the war who makes peace the central theme of his campaign, the Ohio congressman called the situation in Iraq "an unmitigated disaster."
"The men and women who serve there right now, they have targets on their backs. ... They're subject to being shot at from every direction," Kucinich told a crowd of several hundred at a rally outside the state Capitol Wednesday evening.
The U.S. should request that the U.N. establish a peacekeeping force and then "get out of there as a singular presence," he said.
But the U.S. must not turn its back on war-torn Iraq, he also said.
"This administration broke it, and they bought it. And now we have an obligation to make the people there whole. We can't walk away from it," he said.
Nor should the United States determine Iraq's next leader or allow its assets to be privatized, he added....
The Bush administration has cast a spell of fear over the country that has infiltrated people's lives, taken hold of national policies, and taken the country in the direction of war and a rollback of civil liberties, he said.
The United States must become "the light of the world, not a threat to the world," he said.
Rapidly rising defense sending is taking money away from education and health care and housing and social programs, the candidate said.... *****
At 4:21 PM -0400 7/3/03, Guilherme wrote:
>though i don't think he was saying that we should buy the country --
>just pay them reparations.
Kucinich says he is against the US government having Iraq's assets privatized. On the whole, Kucinich sounds better than Dean, but, still, he offers no exit plan with firm deadlines for complete withdrawals of US and (his proposed) UN forces. "Reparations" can't be paid unless there is an independent Iraqi government to which the USG may pay them. Otherwise, "rebuilding Iraq" means US taxpayers paying US-based companies, with much of payments soaked up by profits for the companies and salaries for "experts" who work for them, resulting in little work done for the money spent.
"According to AID administrator Andrew Natsios, the US government will spend no more than $1.7 billion for Iraq's immediate reconstruction needs. With Iraq's infrastructure a shambles, much of its government ministries and agencies looted, and its gross domestic product estimated by the Treasury Department at somewhere between $25 billion and $60 billion a year--less than half of what it was in 1978--many analysts believe the country will need at least $200 billion more to meet the Bush Administration's goal of creating a functioning market economy" (Tim Shorrock, "Selling (Off) Iraq," _The Nation_, June 23, 2003, <http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030623&s=shorrock>). As things stand now, there is a huge financial gap between what the USG will spend and what it would take to reconstruct Iraq's infrastructure, based upon the USG's own figures reported by Tim Shorrock.
Then, there is the cost of the continuing occupation itself:
***** The Seattle Times June 23, 2003, Monday Fourth Edition SECTION: North Zone; News; Pg. A1 LENGTH: 997 words HEADLINE: U.S. to help pick up tab for countries aiding in Iraq Underwriting foreign peacekeepers could cost $250 million for a year BYLINE: Paul Richter; Los Angeles Times DATELINE: Washington
BODY: WASHINGTON When the Pentagon proudly announced last week that more and more countries have been signing up to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq, one fact drew little attention: U.S. taxpayers will be paying a fair chunk of the bill.
As it has sought to spread the peacekeeping burden, the Bush administration has agreed to help underwrite the participation of such countries as Poland, Ukraine, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. India, which the United States has asked to provide thousands of troops, has been asking for financial help as well.
Western European countries such as Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands will pay the full cost of their participation, diplomats said. These deals, which by one estimate could cost $250 million over the next year, will enable the United States to relieve some of its overworked troops and give more of an international face to the American-led undertaking.
But they may also draw criticism that the U.S. partners in the reshaping of Iraq are those whose support can be bought the "coalition of the billing," as some wags have put it, playing off the Bush administration's use of the term "coalition of the willing" during the buildup to the Iraq war.
Pentagon officials say it remains unclear what the total tab will be, because they are still trying to work out arrangements with the nearly 50 countries they say have expressed interest. But it is already clear that the bills will substantially add to U.S. troop expenses that, by one congressional estimate, are running $3 billion a month.
At least 20,000 troops from more than a dozen nations are expected to arrive in the next two months to augment a force of about 146,000 troops from the United States and 12,000 from Britain and seven other countries....
Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, came up with the figure of $250 million to fund the estimated 20,000 troops for the next year.
That assumes, he said, that about half the countries would require help and that the United States would have to put up less than half as much money per soldier as the $10,000 to $20,000 it costs to support an American in the field for a month. Many foreign troops are far less expensive than the highly trained, elaborately equipped U.S. forces.
O'Hanlon noted that even when the United Nations finances peacekeeping missions, the U.S. Treasury covers about 25 percent of the cost, through U.N. dues.
Word of these arrangements has emerged at a time of increasing congressional concern about the staffing and financial burdens of the military mission in Iraq.
At a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, Rep. John Spratt Jr., D-S.C., said that at the present level of U.S. troop commitment, it would cost $54 billion to pay for the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq for a year.
He noted that although allies covered most of the cost of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in this war, allies have agreed to put up only about $3 billion. "Surely we can't sustain the burden of being the world's only superpower, protecting region after region, without some well-developed alliances or allied participation," Spratt said....
The president and other officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have said there is no timetable for a withdrawal of U.S. forces....
The structure of the Iraq force is very different from the peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia and Kosovo following wars that attracted broader international support.
After hostilities ended in Bosnia, the security force was about one-third American; in Kosovo, about one-fifth. By contrast, even with an additional 20,000 allied troops, the United States would be providing more than 80 percent of the foreign troops in Iraq.... *****
I suppose that Kucinich's idea, if implemented, will make the occupation cheaper for US taxpayers, if the US Treasury is to cover only 25 percent of the cost of the UN peacekeepers, as calculated above.
If Kosovo's any indication, however, Iraqis may look forward to high unemployment rates and statistics showing "a slight increase in the average number of policy decisions per month":
***** Deutsche Presse-Agentur May 31, 2003, Saturday 02:05 Central European Time SECTION: Miscellaneous LENGTH: 600 words HEADLINE: NEWS FEATURE: After four years Kosovo remains a bottomless pit DATELINE: Pristina
BODY: The small electricity generators continue to throb on the streets of Pristina, four years after an international initiative to revive the city's infrastructure was put in place.
The city authorities...still have to provide electricity from diesel and petrol powered generators to cope with daily disruptions.
Even Mr Energy, a German appointed to to solve the problem, has been unable to change the situation. The 500 million euros in financial aid that have been earmarked for electricity generation and distribution appear to be leaking away into a bottomless pit. The Albanians in Kosovo regard the electricity situation as a symbol of the failure of the international administration set up under United Nations auspices to come to grips with the province's problems.
Fewer than half of the customers of the Kosovo electricity company actually pay their bills.
"That is after all an absolute precondition for more investment in the technology or to buy electricity across the border," one foreign electricity worker says.
But the customers retort that they see no reason [to] pay, given the repeated cuts in supply and unemployment rates running at 57 per cent or more.... *****
***** Financial Times (London) July 3, 2003, Thursday USA Edition 1 SECTION: OBSERVER; Pg. 12 LENGTH: 164 words HEADLINE: Bean counting OBSERVER COLUMN
BODY: International diplomats struggling with how to measure a country's political progress now have a powerful new tool - at least if a United Nations report on Kosovo is any guide.
In what must rank as one of the world's more obtuse evaluation methods, the report's section on "democratic institutions" focuses on the important statistic of "policy decisions per month".
"The Government of Kosovo took 27 policy decisions from 1 April to 16 June 2003," it reveals. "This is a slight increase in the average number of policy decisions per month relative to the first three months of 2003."
Even more exciting was the finding that there was "a significant increase in the proportion having legal implications".
Forget hospital beds and unemployment. All a struggling bureaucracy needs now is to raise its PDPM quota: a few quick cabinet meetings and the headlines - "government records biggest policy decision per month tally this decade" - are sure to assuage sceptics. ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>