What right does Congress have to make Iraqis pay for their own occupation?

[yurbud]

Before U.S. lawmakers imagine ways to spend Iraq's possible "surplus", they should be asked about the "rights" of an aggressor nation that illegally invades another country. The U.S. waged an unprovoked war of choice against Iraq, a country which posed no threat whatsoever to U.S. people. Did Iraq have any "rights" after it invaded Kuwait? An aggressor nation has no rights. Period. Indeed, the international community, via the U.N. Security Council, continues to punish the Iraqi people for the crimes of Saddam Hussein's regime by requiring Iraq to pay five percent of its oil revenues as "war reparations" for the prior regime's invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91 (with virtually all of the remaining payments going to the governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia or those country's state owned oil enterprises).

Commenting on suggestions that the U.S. impose financial obligations on Iraq, Lando writes:

"This begs the question as to whether a country can invade another country--which inherently destroys the capital, political and societal infrastructure--poorly spend both occupying and occupied funds, unilaterally create conditions of chaos requiring ongoing security and reconstruction funds, and then bind the occupied country to make reparations and take out loans from the occupying country?"

What are some of the "conditions of chaos requiring ongoing security and reconstruction funds" in Iraq? In 1991, the United States deliberately targeted, bombed and destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, in particular its water treatment plants, its electrical plants, and its electrical power grid. This damage was exacerbated over the next thirteen years as the U.S. and UK insisted that the UN maintain brutally punitive economic sanctions that prevented Iraq from substantively rebuilding and caused further decay and debilitation in every sector of Iraq's infrastructure. The sanctions also caused widespread disease, starvation and impoverishment, directly contributing toward the deaths of over one half million children under age five.

http://counterpunch.org/kelly04172008.html">FULL TEXT

[stellanoir]

1. Maybe stop stealing their oil and their money and killing their people and contaminating the rest.

[tom_paine]

2. Come, come now. It's the Nazi thing to do.

An Imperial Amerika, is, without a doubt, the main spiritual inheritor to Nazi Germany these days.

Sure, we are not nearly as violent, and our racism is covert not overt (less of it, too, relatively speaking).

But the Nazis and we have the same media, worthless and toadying.

The Nazis and we have the same level of trustworthiness in our elections: none.

The Bushies lie with the same frequency of the Nazis: greater than 95% of the time.

The Bushies have constructed a lie machine that dwarfs the Nazis' lie machine in sophistication, marketing skill, and psychlogical power. In this they have exceeded the Nazis by several orders of magnitude.

The lies leading up to Hitler's invasion of Poland and Bushler's invasion of Iraq are identical in their methodology of "telling the lie" and just as false.

No question or doubt about it.

Thus, this is not entirely unlike the Nazis taking jews' gold teeth to pay for the running of Auschwitz among other thing. Yes, not as brutal or murderous (for the moment) but similar in criminality and intent.