davidvanwert.com

According to Reuters today, retired American general (and current arms trader) Jay Garner, who is overseeing Iraq’s postwar reconstruction, said on Wednesday that his fellow Americans should beat their chests with pride at having toppled Saddam Hussein without destroying the country’s assets.

“We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: ‘Damn, we’re Americans!’,” Jay Garner told reporters, saying that Iraq’s oil fields survived the war almost intact.

Garner said the war was fought in a way that prevented Saddam’s forces from setting fire to its oilfields and had largely preserved Iraq’s infrastructure intact. “I was planning on the oilfields being torched, a huge humanitarian crisis and a monumental reconstruction task, ” he said. “There is no humanitarian crisis. And there’s not much infrastructure problem here, other than getting the electrical grid structure back together.”

After reading that report, I just had to wonder: Which freakin’ Iraq is Garner in? Because the only Iraq I’ve ever heard of is in the midst of a momumental, catastrophic humanitarian crisis which has lasted well over a decade and recently became a hell of a lot worse.

Since 1990, Iraq has been devestated by sanctions and embargoes which didn’t affect Iraq’s ruling class one bit, but did lead to the deaths of over 1.5 million civilians– including 500,000 children, according to the World Health Organization. In some cases, we wouldn’t even let them have clean water because it might be used in weapons of mass destruction or chemical labs. For over a decade, we held innocent Iraqi people hostage with sanctions, letting children die in hospitals without medicine, hoping maybe it would somehow hurt Saddam Hussein.

But at least the oil wasn’t hurt, right Jay?

No humanitarian crisis in Iraq? Garner should be smacked on the back of the head and sent home immediately. His statements reveal that he’s either an absolute fool or a soulless ass. Or possibly both. In either case, he obviously ain’t the guy for the job.