----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com>
For riverbend.
Last night I pretended I was president of the US and had a week. So I got out my calculator and starting with 135,000, figured it would take two flights an hour, 24/7 at 400/per plane to evacuate 135,000. Destination, nearest Nato airbase in Turkey, Italy, Germany and the UK. That's do-able as they say.
So if Kerry needs a plan. Here's the plan.
Leave the heavy equipment and call it reparations. For tanks and armored vehicles, complex military logistics indicate, they've got drivers and they've got gas. They drove in, they drive out. The only directions they need: head for the western desert and turn left at the tank treads---that's South for the directionally challenged. See ya.
Private contractors and contracts can be cancelled retroactively May 1. Let them sue for the difference. Private personnel get out on their own dime. Take the bus to Kuwait City.
Now the Iraqis can help this plan considerably, especially those who work for US projects. If you got paid Friday, don't come back. That's it.
It's all over but the looting.
CG
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You forgot the heroin.
Ian
Fury rises in Baghdad as drugs return to the alleys By Phil Reeves in Baghdad The Independent on Sunday 11 May 2003
The killing of two US soldiers in Baghdad within 24 hours last week shows how far the US and Britain still have to go to end the chaos gripping the Iraqi capital a month after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Anger is growing among Iraqis at the Allies' failure to restore order in a city awash with weapons and gangs. Heroin - banned under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship upon pain of hanging - is now being traded in back streets.
Residents of Baghdad - a conservative city with a large Shia Muslim population - are complaining that the breakdown in order has accompanied the emergence of some western practices they view as offensive, and which were prohibited, or tightly restricted, under Saddam.
In al-Bataween - the worst of Baghdad's badlands which is blighted by carjackings and crime - residents say heroin is being traded in the alleys. "In Iraq there were no drugs until March 2003," said Salah Sha'amikh, a pharmacist. "You would be hanged for trafficking. But now you can get heroin, cocaine, anything." He pulled out a Russian-made 8.5mm pistol which he says he keeps to protect his wares.
"We are an Islamic society and we don't like drugs. You tell Tony Blair to stop these criminals." Gambling, also banned by Saddam, has begun to spring up too, to the concern of conservative Iraqis.