Month: October 2003

Billions to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure while ours is deteriorating – that’s nuts!

In Jack Arnold’s 1959 satirical movie comedy staring Peter Sellers, “The Mouse That Roared,” the tiny nation of “the Duchy of Grand Fenwick” was going broke.They decided that the only way to stave off financial disaster was to wage war on the United States and lose.The general idea for the movie was based on what the United States did for its enemies after World War II.It virtually “rebuilt” the two nations that were our enemies, Japan and Germany.

As a U.S., Marine at the time, the then young “Ole Seagull” thought to himself, “It would be funny if it wasn’t true but it is true and that’s nuts!”His idea of war more or less aligned itself with the simple three word definition of “war” attributed to General William Tecumseh Sherman, after the battle of Vicksburg, “War is hell.”

Whether done formally or informally, by organized armies, terrorists. or guerillas, be it our Nation waging war on another or another on us, those involved, either directly or indirectly, in starting or conducting a “war” should be prepared for “hell.”Not only the “hell” that is inherent in the actual fighting the war itself but the “hell” that war inflicts on individuals, societies, economies, and governments long after the last shot has been fired.

An April 22, 2003 article entitled “Rebuilding Iraq: What will it cost?” by CNN’s Liz George, reported that, “Analysts have said it could cost anything from $84 billion to nearly $500 billion to rebuild Iraq, a country battered by two wars in two decades and 12 years of United Nations sanctions.”It went on to point out that “One economist from America’s Yale University predicted rebuilding Iraq could cost up to $1.6 trillion over 10 years.”As a point of comparison, the article reported that “so far the cost of rebuilding Afghanistan has topped $900 million.

All over our Nation, from out dated power grids, to the air traffic control system, highways, bridges etc., our basic infrastructure is drastically in need of repair and improvement.The “power grid” failure that hit a large part of our country a few months ago and the reports of how inadequate it is to meet our needs illustrates the deteriorating condition of our nation’s basic infrastructure and its potential consequences in a very dramatic way.

Locally, just last week two more people died on U.S. Highway 65, between Hollister, Missouri and the Arkansas border on a stretch of highway that badly needs improvement.Yet, even in the face of our own national and local infrastructure needs we are, as a nation, going to spend billions repairing the infrastructures of Iraq and Afghanistan that we destroyed while waging war on them.That’s nuts!

Is it unreasonable for an Ole Seagull to think that the threat of war and its “hell,” both during the war and post war, should be used as a deterrent to those who would wage war upon or with us?”Oh, but we are helping the poor people of those countries who have nothing to do with what their governments did.”That’s nuts!

All governments, ours or our prospective enemies, do what they do through the efforts, or lack of effort, of those whom they govern..”It is individual people who visit the actual carnage of war on their enemies.An Ole Seagull once wrote, “It is a sad fact of life that the politicians, and those in power, start wars and that the people of the nations involved bleed, die, suffer, and otherwise pay the price of war.A large part of the “hell” of war should be the “post war” consequences.To remove that deterrent, in the opinion of an Ole Seagull, is just plain nuts!