Iraqi shop owners say ‘no thanks’ to grant

[unhappycamper]

First Lt. Alex Lamolinara, center, a platoon leader with the 3rd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment’s Troops A, tries to get to the bottom of why a shop owner, right, is not interested in a $500 grant.


Iraqi shop owners say ‘no thanks’ to grant
By John Vandiver, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Sunday, May 11, 2008

PATROL BASE ASSASSIN, Iraq — The sales pitch should be easy.

First Lt. Alex Lamolinara goes door-to-door along the strip of banged up storefronts, where there’s a soda shop with no refrigerator, a paint shop without much paint and a bunch of secondhand junk dealers.

The lieutenant, who is looking for potential candidates for a new microbusiness grant program, is dumbstruck. A couple of shops over, he gets the same response.

“Ask him why,” he tells the translator.

~snip~

“He’s scared,” the translator says, referring to the green house of worship known to soldiers as the “JAM Mosque,” after Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi, or Mahdi Army.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=54708

[barbtries]

1. what's 500 dollars

compared to your life? this business of going around now to people whose lives have been absolutely trashed and giving them a few hundred dollars...just get out of their country! stop killing them! make reparations through an international organization that has some credibility in their country. :banghead:

[Sal Minella]

2. I think the $500 microgrants are not intended as reparations, but as bribes to secure goodwill.

I think if I were an Iraqi I would be grossly offended by anyone (U.S. military person or anyone else) trying to buy my loyalty for such a pittance.

[barbtries]

3. i totally agree

what i meant is that the iraqi people deserve reparations

[Sal Minella]

4. Wish we could have back what we've spent on this war -- we could make nice little cash grants to

every struggling little business in the United States and pay reparation to the Iraqi citizens too -- I bet they'd love to have their running water and electricity back, for starters.