Bill Maher: Stop Saying Iraq Is Another Vietnam; It's Another Enron

[babylonsister]

Stop Saying Iraq Is Another Vietnam; It's Another Enron

By Bill Maher, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted September 29, 2007.

Bush is fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. They fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq and cooked the books to keep us there.


Iraq is Enron, and President Bush is Ken Lay. He's fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. The Bush administration fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq, and cooked the books to keep us there. "The surge" is simply another in a long series of inflated stock quotes.

This past weekend Marcel Marceau passed away at age 84. Doctors say he went quietly. Thus proving that evil thrives when good men stay silent. And just like with Enron, the good men and women who are blowing the whistle on Iraq contractor fraud are being vilified, fired, demoted, and those are the lucky ones.

Last Friday morning the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing entitled "The Mistreatment of Iraq Contracting Whistleblowers," just in time to make the Friday news dump. According to the committee more than $10 billion dollars in Iraq reconstruction and military support contracts is unaccounted for.

In other words, for every six dollars spent in Iraq one dollar is in question. And folks, it's a war-zone, you're dealing with a culture known for its haggling skills, so you've got factor in a little skimming, but this is ridiculous. If you stole that much money from the Mafia you'd be dead.

more...

http://alternet.org/waroniraq/63893/

[grasswire]

1. does he mean the Arab world?

He might catch a little flak on that statement about "haggling skills."

[babylonsister]

2. I took that to mean there's not much official law enforcement, so

lots of back-door deals are probably going on all the time. And I've been in several places where haggling is the norm, not the exception like it is here. Items aren't priced; you're expected to barter, or haggle.

[robinlynne]

5. no, he said "war-zone", not arab country.

[robinlynne]

6. paperwork is often not done in a war....for example, the children of american soldiers in

vietnam were all given green cards, with the right to bring all relatives. There are no birth certificates for any of them, because there was a war going on, so people bought and sold their kids to rich families who all came over here as "relatives'.

[existentialist]

3. Point taken, but . . .

It's still enough like Vietnam that a quote from that era keeps coming into my head these days:


"Americans do not like long and indecisive wars, and this is going to be a long and indecisive war. Therefore we are certain to win in the end."


Ho Chi Mihn

[predfan]

4. he nailed it...this is a war for money

here's what the privatization of virtually everything governmental comes to. American soldiers protecting private mercenaries who are making ten times more money (tax free if they schedule their trips home correctly), BILLIONS of dollars disappear, little oversight, and the outsourcing of a billion dollar embassy that will require thousands of American soldiers be present to protect it for generations to come (or until the oils gone, whichever comes first)

Every neocons wet dream.

[BrklynLiberal]

7. I am actually a bit taken aback at his insght and perceptiveness..

Great article.