I've been reading a lot of chatter over this on the various sites I visit and at some point I posted this opinion (which I'm rewriting slightly and reposting here):
Iraq did not ask for this war and should not be obliged to finance it or provide reparations to Iraqis
or to Americans. That money belongs to the Iraqi people and should be seen totally separate from war costs. Like Powell said,
you break it, you own it. That's how the game works; after Iraq had invaded Kuwait and was routed from the country by Bush senior's coalition, they
had to pay whopping reparations to Kuwait and to any corporation who suffered damages because of the war. I believe they were
still paying towards these reparations at the time Saddam's body was buried.
Though politically, it's attractive to link the Iraqi budget surplus to America's budget deficit, America's financial woes are of no consequence to the Iraqi people and neither should it be. The cause of the deficit is not something they have had any influence over, it is entirely the USA's doing. These two issues are not linked in any way.
Yes, reconstruction of the damage caused is costing America an arm and a leg. that's what you get
when you put profiteers in charge of that kind of stuff. They have milked the American taxpayer for every cent they could, and then took some more.
These are the people to get angry at, not the benighted people of that region left with almost no law, order, infrastructure or civil society. There are many sharks in the water feeding off Iraq's corpse right now... and who in fact would greatly benefit from the country remaining ungovernable for as long as possible. Halliburton is a huge company with many subsidiaries who are making obscene amounts of money in the region, then there is Blackwater and a number of smaller but no less greedy fish.
That surplus money sitting in the bank, the amount is as high as it is because of the oil price. Iraq has had no influence on that. Fact is, much of this money is earmarked in the budget that this puppet government simply cannot get passed because of political shenanigans. But hey, you don't install a puppet government and then get angry at them for being good puppets. Good puppets tend to do this:
Fuck the good of the people, how can i get the most out of this for myself!!?? And in the end, even if they wanted to, the systems and manpower for good government are simply not in place. They could not even begin to reconstruct the country themselves right now, it is in such shambles. Catch 22.
This is smoke and mirrors. Americans are being manipulated into being angry at the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Elections coming up, right? Right.
I also added the following:Here is another way of looking at the finances, if one were to consider the angle of reparations, and who owes what to whom (this is from 2006)
Economic View: War cut Iraq's national income 40%
War cut Iraq's national income 40%
By Anna Bernasek
Published: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2006
NEW YORK: What has been the economic cost of the Iraq war for Iraq? Several studies have dealt with the war's cost to Americans, but few have studied the other side.
The loss of human life has always been evident. Recently, the United Nations estimated that 100 Iraqis were dying each day, on average, as a result of the war. Other observers, like The Lancet, the British medical journal, have put the death toll as much as five times higher, amounting to the implied loss of 2 percent of Iraq's population since the invasion in March 2003.
The economic cost has been less visible. Published information on the subject is very limited, although one economist, Colin Rowat, has made some preliminary calculations. Rowat, a specialist on the Iraqi economy at the University of Birmingham in Britain, relied mainly on data from the International Monetary Fund to estimate the war's overall effect on the Iraqi economy. His calculations are a work in progress, but what he has found so far is sobering: the cost amounts to a cut of at least 40 percent in Iraq's national income.
Rowat looked at the six-year stretch from 2000 to 2005 and divided it into thirds. During the first period, 2000 to 2001, United Nations trade sanctions against Iraq were beginning to crumble; the Security Council lifted the cap on Iraqi oil sales to the rest of the world, and the Iraqi government was becoming adept at getting around the remaining trade restrictions. The second period, 2002 to 2003, covers the buildup to war and the invasion itself. The last period, 2004 to 2005, covers post-invasion years when sanctions were removed.
Rowat made several kinds of calculations. First, he estimated the actual change in the size of Iraq's economy. Then he considered the economic effects of foreign aid in 2005, much of it from the United States. (Because foreign aid is regarded as temporary and is expected to taper off, he said, excluding it reveals Iraq's underlying economic performance.)
Finally, he estimated how the economy might have performed had the war never happened. This last estimate, of course, depends on a host of assumptions, as Rowat would be the first to say. He assumed, for example, that in the absence of war, Iraq's economy would have been driven by the price of oil. Oil prices are, in fact, crucial to Iraq, representing 60 percent of the total economy, according to the World Bank. Rowat also assumed that the economy would have grown from 2002 to 2005 as it did from 2000 to 2001 - at a pace equal to 71 percent of the rate of increase in world oil prices.
Of course, some of the oil-price increase in recent years must be attributed to the Iraq war itself, which Rowat acknowledged but did not factor in.
Looking first at the actual Iraqi economy, he calculated that it may have grown 3.1 percent a year, on average and after adjusting for inflation, from 2000 through 2005. When he subtracted foreign aid from that total, however, he found that the economy actually contracted 0.2 percent a year over the same period.
Finally, based on the steep rise in oil prices, he estimated that without a war and with steady oil production, Iraq would have grown 12 percent a year after adjusting for inflation. That rate would have made Iraq one of the fastest- growing economies in the world, albeit one that was expanding from a very small economic base.
How realistic is this projection? It is hard to say, because so much of it depends on oil economics. Still, the IMF forecasts that the Iraqi economy will grow an average of better than 10 percent annually over the next five years.
Using Rowat's calculations, what might the economic cost of the war be for Iraq? If there had been no war, Iraq's economy in 2005 might have amounted to $61 billion in today's dollars, compared with the actual $37 billion, he estimated. That amounts to a 40 percent cut in gross domestic product per capita - an average loss of around $900 for each Iraqi in 2005.
Rough estimates of the war's overall cost to Americans are in the neighborhood of $1 trillion over a 10-year period. That works out to around 1 percent of the nation's income during that period.
For Iraq, there is no doubt that continuing violence and turmoil are hurting the economy. The IMF said in August that Iraq's oil production has not yet returned to prewar levels due to the violence, which is preventing much- needed investment, and to infrastructure problems.
While Rowat's calculations represent just one economist's efforts to wrestle with extremely limited data, his work may encourage others to follow. Assessing the war's economic cost for Iraq, of course, doesn't provide an answer to whether the war is worthwhile in the long run. But it does provide a clue.
Source
If America were to be subjected to the same rigid reparation accounting standards as Iraq was after the invasion of Kuwait, it would
hurt. The above is a first attempt at quantifying the loss of income, but I doubt it will ever go much further than that. The USA is much more powerful than Iraq and won't ever face (or allow itself to be held to) a UN resolution such as number 687.
Finally, here is an article by Naomi Klein, about the war reparations that Iraq had to pay for the very short Kuwait war. Note the beneficiaries...
Reparations in Reverse
by Naomi Klein
October 14 2004
Next week, something will happen that will unmask the upside-down morality of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. On October 21, Iraq will pay $200-million in war reparations to some of the richest countries and corporations in the world.
If that seems backwards, it’s because it is. Iraqis have never been awarded reparations for any of the crimes they have suffered under Saddam, or the brutal sanctions regime that claimed the lives of at least half a million people, or the U.S.-led invasion, which United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Anan recently called “illegal.” Instead, Iraqis are still being forced to pay reparations for crimes committed by their former dictator.
Quite apart from its crushing $125-billion sovereign debt, Iraq has paid $18.8-billion in reparations stemming from Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait. This is not in itself surprising: as a condition of the ceasefire that ended the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam agreed to pay damages stemming from the invasion. More than fifty countries have made claims, with most of the money awarded to Kuwait. What is surprising is that even after Saddam was overthrown, the payments from Iraq have continued.
Since Saddam was toppled in April, Iraq has paid out $1.8-billion in reparations to the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), the Geneva-based quasi tribunal that assesses claims and disburses awards. Of those payments, $37-million have gone to Britain and $32.8-million have gone to the United States. That’s right: in the past 18 months, Iraq’s occupiers have collected $69.8-million in reparation payments from the desperate people they have been occupying. But it gets worse: the vast majority of those payments—78 per cent—have gone to multinational corporations, according to statistics on the UNCC website.
Away from media scrutiny, this has been going on for years. Of course there are many legitimate claims for losses that have come before the UNCC: payments have gone to Kuwaitis who have lost loved ones, limbs, and property to Saddam’s forces. But much larger awards have gone to corporations—of the total amount the UNCC has awarded in Gulf War reparations, $21.5-billion has gone to the oil industry alone. Jean-Claude Aimé, the UN diplomat who headed the UNCC until December 2000, publicly questioned the practice. “This is the first time as far as I know that the UN is engaged in retrieving lost corporate assets and profits,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 1997, and then mused: “I often wonder at the correctness of that.”
But the UNCC’s corporate handouts only accelerated. Here is a small sample of who has been getting “reparation” awards from Iraq: Halliburton ($18-million), Bechtel ($7-million), Mobil ($2.3-million), Shell ($1.6-million), Nestle ($2.6-million), Pepsi ($3.8-million), Philip Morris ($1.3-million), Sheraton ($11-million), Kentucky Fried Chicken ($321-thousand) and Toys R Us ($189,449). In the vast majority of cases, these corporations did not claim that Saddam’s forces damaged their property in Kuwait—only that they “lost profits” or, in the case of American Express, experienced a “decline in business,” because of the invasion and occupation of Kuwait. One of the biggest winners has been Texaco, which was awarded $505-million in 1999. According to a UNCC spokesperson, only 12 per cent of that reparation award has been paid, which means hundreds of millions more will have to come out of the coffers of post-Saddam Iraq.
The fact that Iraqis have been paying reparations to their occupiers is all the more shocking in the context of how little these countries have actually spent on aid in Iraq. Despite the $18.4-billion of U.S. tax dollars allocated for Iraq’s reconstruction, the Washington Post estimates that only $29-million has been spent on water, sanitation, health, roads, bridges, and public safety—combined. And in July (the latest figure available), the Department of Defense estimated that only $4 million had been spent compensating Iraqis who had been injured, or who lost family members or property as a direct result of the occupation—a fraction of what the U.S. has collected from Iraq in reparations since its occupation began.
Rest here
I don't think anything more needs to be said. This is a non-issue.
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