This article had me in tears with glee over the deep irony and calculated political slap. While I’m no fan of Saddam Hussein’s, the consternation in Washington must be tremendous.
I’m know that this is a PR move by Iraq, but will it make any difference in U.S.? $94MM doesn’t go very far feeding the poor, but it’s a significant (if cynical) gesture. Assuming the money actually makes it into hungry mouths, how could it not?
If the sanctions against Iraq are creating the chaos that people are claiming, why not spend it on the Iraqi poor? They need it more than we do.
This is too much like Clinton bombing Iraq to try to postpone getting impeached. It is too transparent to have any effect.
I bet it’s all going to be in small bills, dropped from helicopters onto major metropolitan areas.
Anybody know where I can get an anthrax vaccination?
Sanctions? Yeah, right. Like those have been enforced for the past 5 years. :wally
They probably have more money than they know what to do with there these days.
LOL! To heck with helicopters, I bet it will be delivered via their new national carrier, SCUD AIR.
It is more of a patronizing political move, like when Cuba offered to send election observers to the US last year. That was funny too. I very much prefer these thinly veiled sardonic insults to the mud-slinging we usually see.
It took them a while, but it looks as though politicians have finally grown a sense of humor. Good for them.
‘SLAP!!’
That’s cool! Just another childish jab by the egomaniac. Of course, it would be cool if Bill Gates, now worth something like 40 billion, would divest himself of around 1 billion to help the poor in the US.
Not that such a thing is ever likely to happen.
Damn that Bill Gates. He never does ANYTHING to help ANYONE!
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/grantlist.asp?mode=&search=
That bastard…
As to the OP, I have to wonder why a man who’s trying to get sanctions repealed on the grounds that it’s killing his country feels the need to help out one of the richest countries on earth.
Yeah, Joel, except why are all the liberal groups screaming about how our sanctions are murdering millions of innocent Iraqi children?
There’s a difference between Saddam’s cronies getting rich, and the country itself getting rich.
Becuase Saddam is deliberately killing his own people for the propaganda it causes- and the Liberal press is buying it.
And, since it is IRAQs money he is spending on himslf & his croneis- there is no difference. If Saddam spent all the money he is spending on palaces, toys, weapons of mass destruction, and more military on his people instaed- there would be NO poverty.
But that’s probably true for most countries in the world. Maybe if the US didn’t spend so much on their military they wouldn’t need all that Iraqi humanitarian aid.
EGGs-But the USA is not claiming that ANOTHER counties “imperialistic policies” are killing our children- while we spend the money. And- at a certain point- many experts think that simply “throwing more money at the problem” will not help poverty. Argueably- we have reached that point in the USA. Iraq claims just the opposite.
So what exactly are the sanctions’ effect on Iraq? They haven’t gotten the iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam and most likely haven’t done those in power any real financial damage - these things never do - so who’s left to take the punch?
While it might be the right thing to do for a country to move funds from the ruling class and military to the people who need it, it is incredibly naive to expect that would actually happen. It won’t. No way, no how. Especially not in a totalitarian state. Everyone must have known this when the sanctions were first introduced.
Even if you disregard the purely financial implications the sanctions include restrictions to medical equipment since the difference between what’s needed to produce medicines and bio-war agents is minimal. I’d bet their health care has deteriorated significantly the past decade, and would have even if it had had adequate funding.
So yes, I’d say the sanctions really do kill children. And it’s not just because of how Saddam Hussein chooses to run his country under current conditions. The sanctions and the people who implemented them share a big part of the blame.
For a reasonably large country like Iraq €100 million isn’t all that much money and it would only put a minor dent in the country’s poverty. Shold they actually be donated (and not refused by the US), it might be money well spent if the PR helps end the sanctions and even if it doesn’t it will make the US look bad whatever they decide to do.