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Another Day, Another Heist in Baghdad
Hours before the White House released its tepid assessment of Iraq's progress on 18 congressional benchmarks, Baghdad's Dar Es Salaam bank was burgled of some $282 million. Apparently the heist was an inside job carried out by bank guards, who, Iraqi officials are speculating, have ties to the militias. If true, that certainly doesn't bode well for the security situation, raising the possibility that some rather unsavory militants are about to get a large cash infusion.
Believe it or not, but this massive heist is only the second largest in the country's history (not counting the hundreds of millions of dollars that vanished under the watchful eye of Iraq's defense ministry) . The first, which is the world's largest, happened shortly before the U.S. invasion commenced in March 2003, when Saddam Hussein and his family pilfered $1 billion from Iraq's Central Bank.
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The Iraqis are not worth another dime or American life. I would support an immediate withdrawal so they can all kill eachother. Why be in the middle of it? Islam is a "religion of peace." It's peaceful for Muslims to blow each other up on a daily basis.
Yeah, like those Muslim Irish and Basque idiots too!
Riiiiiight.
'Cause that's the American thing to do: go stir up a sh*t storm, make some gestures towards democracy, and then run like hell when things fall apart and chaos reigns.
Face the facts IRAC SUX, the Iraqis are worth many more dimes and more American lives: we don't exactly have an excess of moral credibility in the world to spend on a unilateral withdrawl that leaves the region a violent volatile bloodbath.
If we leave and allow that country and region to tear itself apart, America is going to be in a very, very bad place.
We can't leave until an international peace-keeping force takes over.
We started this mess unilaterally, and it'll only get messier if we try and end it unilaterally: it's time to get the UN involved--led, you guessed it, by a largely American force, and funded largely by American dollars.
This was truly a large heist but it pales in comparison to the 3300 tons of U.S. currency that is just "missing" according the Paul Bremer when he was asked what happen to the 2200 tons of money that went "missing" when he was in charge of Iraq. Another 1000 tons or 1400 tons of money has also just disappeared since then as well. 3300 tons of money=about $20,000,000,000 billion, FYI.
1 billion simply cannot be the largest heist.
As bogi666 points out, the US sent billions into Iraq, and tons of it (literally, TONS) has gone missing or unaccounted for.
The Coalition Provisional Authority wrote a memo on the subject:
"Many of the funds appear to have been lost to corruption and waste ... thousands of 'ghost employees' were receiving pay cheques from Iraqi ministries under the CPA's control. Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents fighting the United States."
The history is already written, if largely unaccepted: America's catastrophic imperial adventure in Iraq is to date the largest heist ever pulled--no getaway car, no masked gunman, just unbridled corruption.
Just follow the money (the oil money, the reconstruction money, etc.), if you can stomach it, and you'll see the biggest heist ever pulled.
Daniel, honey. You are simply devine!