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Last
year I read of how Princeton University "Civil War" and Lincoln
scholar James McPherson was on the government payroll to advise the
Republican Party on how to "reconstruct" Iraq. My first thought
was, well, if he uses the Republican Party during the 1865–1877
"reconstruction" of the South as his model, as he most likely
would, then the results will be perfectly predictable: Little or nothing will
be rebuilt or reconstructed despite spending billions of dollars; scores of
Republican Party hacks, hangers on, and contractors will pocket most of the
money; this will generate deep resentment among the Iraqis; and the whole
disaster will be used as an excuse to throw even more taxpayer dollars down
this Godforsaken rathole.
Much
of the money will be used to buy the political support of various factions in
Iraq in order to support this shady racket. And, many millions of these
dollars will be recycled to the Republican Party in the form of campaign
contributions from all of these wealthy American contractors in an effort to
keep the whole racket going indefinitely.
I was
right of course since, as I said, it was all perfectly predictable. Although
the government and its lapdog media have been mostly silent about Iraqi
"reconstruction," some information is beginning to seep out. A
January 31 Baltimore Sun article by reporter David Wood gave an
advance view of a "soon-to-be-released" report by the U.S. Special
Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction, Stuart W. Brown, detailing the
squandering of at least $21 billion so far. "The government of Iraq has
been unable to boost the production of oil or electricity despite U.S.
aid," Mr. Wood reports. Even in Baghdad, the electricity is on only 6.5
hours a day "because of political squabbles about which power plants in
regions outside of Baghdad should share electricity with the capital."
"Some
of the work done under U.S. supervision has been so shoddy that it will
saddle the Iraqi government with additional maintenance headaches" and
tax increases to pay for the "headaches." For example, the
U.S.-built Baghdad Police College, which cost $73 million, has "feces
and urine . . . trickling from a ceiling in the student barracks" and
"massive expansion cracks have appeared" in the one-year-old
building.
Because
of "cost overruns [on the barracks project], much of the scheduled
construction was simply abandoned. . . " An Iraqi government official
who was supposed to officially take possession of the College refused to
accept the worthless building.
An
earlier report by Bowen’s office concluded that under former Viceroy
Paul Bremmer’s rule more than $8 billion simply disappeared and is
unaccounted for. The U.S. government is also unable to account for 90,000 rifles
and 80,000 pistols that were supposed to arm the Iraqi police forces three
years ago. Another $36.4 million that was allotted for body armor and weapons
"cannot be accounted for." A billion dollars earmarked for a
refinery repair program was stolen and ended up in the hands of the
"insurgency." Iraq’s oil refineries are still
"dilapidated" and suffering from "crippling problems"
despite several billion U.S. tax dollars being earmarked to repair
them. And this is just what our government bureaucrats admit to.
In all
areas of government, failure is success. I call it DiLorenzo’s Iron Law
of Government. If government spending on an ostensible problem makes the
problem worse, the government’s response is always to spend more
on it, just the opposite of how the free market operates to penalize
failure and reward success. It’s still "too premature to render a
verdict" on Iraqi "reconstruction," says Bowen. The
"obvious" answer to this disastrous situation, he says, is to spend
even more billions in "a new phase of investment." That of course
is what President Bush proposed recently when he called for increased
"New Deal" spending in Iraq, complete with an Iraqi Civilian
Conservation Corps. Bowen also calls for America’s "allies,"
such as they are, to pony up additional billions. How grateful they must be
for having received that request.
The
Republican Party occupiers of Iraq must have studied the work of James
McPherson very carefully, for history is indeed repeating itself. When the
Republican Party (which was the U.S. government in the decades after
the War to Prevent Southern Independence) occupied the South as a military
dictatorship there was a similar squandering of incredible amounts of tax
dollars. As the great Colombia University historian William Archibald Dunning
wrote in his book, Essays on the Civil War,
"the expenses of [Southern] governments were largely increased; offices
were multiplied in all departments; salaries were made more worthy. . .;
costly enterprises were undertaken . . . . The result of all this was . . .
an expansion of state debts and an increase in taxation that to the
property-owning class were appalling and ruinous."
Furthermore,
wrote Dunning, "the progressive depletion of the public treasuries was
accompanied by great private prosperity among [Republican] politicians of
high and low degree." For example, Illinois native Henry Clay Warmoth
was put in place as the Reconstruction governor of Louisiana and paid $8,000
per year in salary. After four years in office he "accumulated"
more than $1 million and retired to a large plantation.
To
help keep this racket going the Republican Party of the 1860s and 1870s
subsidized pro-Republican newspapers while sometimes banning the opposition
press in the South. A similar effort is underway today in Iraq.
James
McPherson, who recently retired from Princeton, can now be counted as among
the hangers on who have benefited financially from America’s shameful
system of "reconstruction." Court historians are, after all,
indispensable if the public is to be hoodwinked and lulled into acquiescing
in such colossal rip-offs.
Thomas DiLorenzo
Also
by Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about
Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His
latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed
the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.
Copyright
© 2009 by LewRockwell.com
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