Remember when foreign countries were bitching loudly about not getting a fair shot at the contracts within Iraq?
President Bush rebuffed growing criticism Thursday, most recently from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, on the U.S. policy banning opponents of the war in Iraq from receiving billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts. "It's very simple," he told reporters at the White House after a Cabinet meeting. "Our people risked their lives, friendly coalition folks risked their lives, and therefore the contracting is going to reflect that."
Think they are all still interested? After all, whom could French companies ask to dispossess the Iraqi Marsh Arabs this time?
The French "were refusing to send their oil engineers into an area where they might be kidnapped by rebel forces," Timmerman wrote. "So they suggested that the Iraqi’s ‘clean up’ the area ahead of tine." As a result "thousands of ‘marsh Arabs’ paid the ultimate price for this particular instance of French cupidity.
Acting on orders from Chiraq’s pal Saddam, Iraqi armament engineers diverted the marsh’s water sources thus drying up thousands of square miles of marshland and ending a way of life and destroying one of the world’s most beautiful areas both of which have enchanted Westerners for eons.
"Some three hundred thousand marsh Arabs were sent into forced exile in Iran, their way of life gone forever," Timmerman wrote.
IMHO, any country or company that abandons Iraq now shouldn't be let back in for at least fifty years.