I thought I'd post this news item about a Chinese built railway in Turkey, as it provides an interesting contrast to what's happening in Syria, right next door to Turkey.
South of Turkey, we see the west interfering in the internal affairs of other nations and peoples, assisting in blasting things to bits.
On the other hand, within Turkey, we can see a maligned China constructively assisting a country to progress. Which, do you think, is the better way?
The United States, according to former US State Department employee, Peter Van Buren,* in a commentary on the current mess in Iraq, published in Asia Times ( read it at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-02-240914.html ) noted the cost of the Iraq war
The staggering costs of all this -
US$25 billion to train the Iraqi Army,
$60 billion for the reconstruction-that-wasn't,
$2 trillion for the overall war,
See that- the American tax-payers provided $60 billion to "re-construct" Iraq. Does anyone see a 'reconstructed' Iraq?
So where did the money go? No-one seems to know that. Strange, isn't it?
Van Buren does comment on what was done to 're-construct' Iraq. It seems he played a small role. Here's what he said, in the above cited commentary:
After 22 years as a diplomat with the Department of State, I spent 12 long months in Iraq in 2009-2010 as part of the American occupation. My role was to lead two teams in "reconstructing" the nation. In practice, that meant paying for schools that would never be completed, setting up pastry shops on streets without water or electricity, and conducting endless propaganda events on Washington-generated themes of the week ("small business," "women's empowerment," "democracy building.")
The re-construction of Iraq patently failed - instead this is what the American tax-payers got:
... almost 4,500 Americans dead and more than 32,000 wounded, and an Iraqi death toll of more than 190,000 (though some estimates go as high as a million) - can now be measured against the results. The nine-year attempt to create an American client state in Iraq failed, tragically and completely. The proof of that is on today's front pages.
The new war on terror finds its roots in the failure of the west to understand the Islamic condition, and the stupidity of Bush and Blair.
According to the crudest possible calculation, we spent blood and got no oil. Instead, America's war of terror resulted in the dissolution of a Middle Eastern post-Cold War stasis that, curiously enough, had been held together by Iraq's previous autocratic ruler Saddam Hussein. We released a hornet's nest of Islamic fervor, sectarianism, fundamentalism, and pan-nationalism. Islamic terror groups grew stronger and more diffuse by the year. That horrible lightning over the Middle East that's left American foreign policy in such an ugly glare will last into our grandchildren's days. There should have been so many futures. Now, there will be so few as the dead accumulate in the ruins of our hubris. That is all that we won.
$60 billion and no results. If you owned a business and the management did that to you, what would you do? Yet, new faces, out of the same old mould trot out the same old slogans.
But if you want change? And I feel confident that American tax-payers do want change, that they may not begrudge that sort of money, if they got results. If you do want change, if you do want results, just cross the border and see another way. (in the next post)
* Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
