You Want Good News?

Sorry, no can do. Not with all this crap going down in Iraq:

SYDNEY, Australia — Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein, as lawlessness and sectarian violence sweep the country, the former U.N. human rights chief in Iraq said Thursday.

John Pace, who last month left his post as director of the human rights office at the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, said the level of extra-judicial executions and torture is soaring, and morgue workers are being threatened by both government-backed militia and insurgents not to properly investigate deaths.

“Under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic right to freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK,” Pace said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But now, no. Here, you have a primitive, chaotic situation where anybody can do anything they want to anyone.”

Pace, who was born in Malta but now resides in Australia, said that while the scale of atrocity under Saddam was “daunting,” now nobody is safe from abuse.

“It is certainly as bad,” he said. “It extends over a much wider section of the population than it did under Saddam.”

Let that sink in. Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad today as they ever were under Saddam. Torture, killings, et cetera, are soaring. A situation where anyone (okay, anyone with a gun) can do anything to anybody. To sum up: Saddam = no freedom but physical security if you go along to get along. U.S. “liberation” = Chaos and no physical security for more Iraqis than under Saddam. Is that a good trade off?

In fact, things are likely far worse than we are being led to believe if morgue workers, out of fear for their lives, are not reporting all the dead bodies they receive. I think this qualifies as something more important to report upon than whatever reconstruction is going on — oh, whoops! I forgot. We stopped funding reconstruction projects, didn’t we. Except for prisons, that is:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department is winding down its $20 billion reconstruction program in Iraq and the only new rebuilding money in its latest budget request is for prisons, officials said on Tuesday.

State Department Iraq coordinator James Jeffrey told reporters he was asking Congress for $100 million for prisons but no other big building projects were in the pipeline for the department’s 2006 supplemental and 2007 budget requests for Iraq, which total just over $4 billion.

“This is the one bit of construction we will be doing — $100 million for additional bed capacity for the Iraqi legal system,” he said.

Nice euphemism — $100 million for (ahem) “additional bed capacity for the Iraqi legal system.” What? They giving all these terrorists Sleep Number beds or something? Just kidding Alberto. A little joke like Ann Coulter makes, minus the death threats.

But let me re-emphasize why I don’t do the Good News thing when it comes to Iraq (besides the fact that no one in the Bush administration is paying me to do so). Maybe it’s because of stuff like this:

Experts on Iraq reconstruction said it was notable that the only new rebuilding money was for prisons after the public relations disaster caused by the eruption of the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison where U.S. forces abused Iraqi inmates.

“For a country like the United States that is promoting the advancement of freedom, building jails is not necessarily your best image,” said Rick Barton of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. […]

Barton said the budget requests were in line with U.S. efforts to wrap up existing projects, many of which have not reached their targets, and to use remaining funds to help Iraqis sustain that work rather than launch new projects.

Congress has so far allocated just over $20 billion for Iraqi reconstruction in a program that put much of its early focus on giant electricity and water projects. Many of those were later scaled back and funds diverted to training Iraq’s security forces to tackle the insurgency.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was grilled by Congress this month over the rebuilding program in Iraq, where water, sewer and electricity services are worse than they were before the U.S. invasion despite the billions of dollars the United States has poured into those sectors.

The Bush administration came under heavy criticism for handing out giant contracts to U.S. firms with close government ties like oil services company Halliburton, which was once run by Vice President Dick Cheney.

With the insurgency curbing rebuilding and funds being redirected to bolster Iraq’s security forces, many of these contracts have not produced value for money.

You see, when you can’t give people basic security, nothing else matters. And throwing money at all Bush’s Republican Party corporate “friends” (i.e., the ones who paid their bribes) isn’t a valid strategy to reconstruct a country devastated by war and allowed to descend into chaos through lack of planning, ignorance and sheer carelessness. So what have all our tax payer dollars bought us in Iraq? One really fucked-up Pottery Barn (with apologies to that fine store).

Oh, I should add, we aren’t just building prisons. We do allocate funds for one other significant project:

Among other budget requests was $287 million to improve security for Iraq’s oil and electricity sectors, which involved burying pipelines, putting up fences and watchtowers and training guards, said Jeffrey.

That’s right folks. More money for the security of oil pipelines, more even than we are spending on new prisons — er, additional bed capacity. Why? Because the spice must flow!