meganmonkey

Iraq to chase missing billions
Parliament seeks UN help to track down what it calls Iraqi oil money stolen from reconstruction fund.

Iraq's parliament has asked the United Nations for help to track down about $18bn of Iraqi oil money it says was stolen after the 2003 US-led invasion.

In a letter to the UN office in Baghdad last month, parliament's Integrity Committee asked for help to find and recover the oil money taken from the Development Fund of Iraq (DFI) in 2004 and lost in the chaos that followed the invasion.

In 2004, the Bush administration flew billions of dollars in cash into Iraq. The money came from the sale of Iraqi oil, surplus funds from the UN oil-for-food programme and seized Iraqi assets.

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"Safeguarding the money was up to the Americans ... after the invasion, coalition provisional authority (CPA) here was run by the American military.

"Piles and piles of shrink-wrapped US dollars came here, but the cash coming in is not the important part - it is what happened to it after [it got here].

"There are no documents to indicate who got it, where it was spent and what was ever built from it."

more:

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/mi...042488179.html

This comes as no surprise, really. As Major General Smedley Butler so eloquently explained in 1935, War Is A Racket. And in the big picture, $18 billion is a drop in the bucket ( "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted").

But it's got me thinking.

Let's see...the US and other western capitalist powers meddle in Iraq for decades, install a dictator, support him and his military, and then do an about-face, invading the country twice with a long period of baby-killing sanctions and occasional bombing in between, followed by the execution of the now-useless dictator, the installation of a puppet government and a continued violent occupation.

The amount of profit generated for the ruling class by crimes like the one being committed in Iraq is immeasurable (not to mention Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria today and dozens of other nations in recent history). There are dozens of layers of profit in the production and sale of military weapons, equipment and supplies, the logistics of occupation, and the long term plunder of natural resources and labor of workers.

Balancing all that profit for the ruling class, we have the immeasurable cost of this imperialism on the working class and poor who fight the wars, who perform the labor for far less than their worth, and who see their taxes spent on these so-called missions of democracy. We may not be seeing our homes destroyed by bombs here in the US but there is no doubt that the cost of imperialist military action lands on our backs as well. Our national resources are gone, spent on turning foreign cities to dust, while our infrastructure crumbles. Bridges fall, schools close, social services are wiped out, and the most vulnerable people are left living in tents while the homes we were evicted from are empty and neglected.

None of this is new. As Butler's short book linked above and a quote from Eugene Debs below demonstrate, the truth about war has been exposed before. The ruling class' propaganda is confusing, powerful and effective. It is vital that we avoid the relativism, equivocating, and flat-out lies of the press, politicians and bourgeois apologists and speak the truth clearly, loudly, and often. it's the least we can do.

And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose-especially their lives.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world, you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

And here let me emphasize the fact-and it cannot be repeated too often-that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace.

It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.

"Yours not to reason why; yours but to do or die."

That is their motto, and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation.

--E.V. Debs 1918 Canton, OH
http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs...918/canton.htm