Mendacity & hypocrisy in plain view

Iraq palace construction trumps reconstruction

Atrios caught my eye with one of his pithy items yesterday. Rumsfeld, apparently, has given up on reconstructing Iraq:

We're not there to do nation-building. They're going to have to build their own nation. It's going to be an Iraqi solution, ultimately.

This follows reports out over the last few weeks that the US has all but cancelled any remaining efforts at reconstruction.

Rumsfeld and company must be counting on everybody forgetting how they used to talk about the mission, as Atrios reminded us.

President Bush (May 1, 2003): We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. [emphasis added]

Today we can look into the eye of the dictator and see that he is Bush. Here is a story posted at CorpWatch this past week:

Baghdad Embassy Bonanza
Kuwait Company’s Secret Contract & Low-Wage Labor
by David Phinney, Special to CorpWatch; February 12th, 2006
...
the massive $592-million project may be the most lasting monument to the U.S. occupation in the war-torn nation. Located on a on a 104-acre site on the Tigris river where U.S. and coalition authorities are headquartered, the high-tech palatial compound is envisioned as a totally self-sustaining cluster of 21 buildings reinforced to 2.5 times usual standards. Some walls as said to be 15 feet thick or more. Scheduled for completion by June 2007, the installation is touted as not only the largest, but the most secure diplomatic embassy in the world.

The 1,000 or more U.S. government officials calling the new compound home will have access to a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food court and a commissary. In addition to the main embassy buildings, there will be a large-scale Maine barracks, a school, locker rooms, a warehouse, a vehicle maintenance garage, and six apartment buildings with a total of 619 one-bedroom units. Water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be independent from Baghdad's city utilities. The total site will be two-thirds the area of the National Mall in Washington, DC.

The upshot of this whole story is that the dictator's palace is being built by virtual slave laborers, 900 of whom ``live and work for First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting (FKTC) on the construction site of the massive project.''

Why should I be surprised and so sickened by the mendacity and hypocrisy of the president and his ministers? I guess I just recall all of the pre-war propaganda concerning Saddam's palaces, where the bad man supposedly was storing weapons and sinking the wealth purloined from his people, instead of giving them the basic services and infrastructure they needed. Now the US is shameless in the same role.