KINSLEY ON RECONSTRUCTION
Michael Kinsley is skeptical about the Iraq rebuilding effort, specifically how the contracts are being awarded. He thinks it’s a bad idea to limit contracts to countries that participated in Iraq’s liberation, especially when some of the beneficiaries are Republican donors.
I suppose these things get touchy and I might have been a bit critical of this conduct if it were the Clinton Administration doing it. Still, there are only two parties. Further, most of the corporations involved in the oil business are likely to lean Republican. Unless there is some specific showing that Halliburton or others got a sweetheart deal, I’m not sure what the complaint is.
Most of the rest of the article is, frankly, bizarre. Kinsley implies that it is “convenient” that Bush launched a war and is now creating jobs for American companies by having them fix the things destroyed:
The feeling seems to be: Hey, we paid for the destruction. If it weren’t for us, there wouldn’t be all these roads and bridges that need rebuilding. So, if someone’s going to make money rebuilding them, it ought to be us.
Does he really think that’s why we went to war? So we could create jobs fixing runways? I mean, wouldn’t it have been a lot simpler to simply propose a huge domestic infrastructure improvement project?
