by James Glaser
December 28, 2004

If you looked at the photographs and video footage of what we have done to the city of Fallujah in the last two months, you know we are going to drop a bundle rebuilding that city. Beside redoing the whole sewage, water distribution system there is the electrical grid, the hospitals and clinics we destroyed, heck lets face it, we destroyed the whole city and it was bigger than Minneapolis.

Baghdad has been exploding for almost two years along with much of the rest of the country. People don't even think about it, but when we drop 2,000 pound bombs on a village or city, we are going to get stuck with the repair bill. Colin Powell said it best when he said that if "we break it, we own it" and have to repair it.

We had a choice going in and we decided that we should destroy the electrical generating plants along with the sewage treatment plants, and the water works. We made that choice knowing that we would have to spend billions fixing everything up.

We knew that going in and we bombed those facilities anyway. Millions of Iraqis have suffered because of that decision and now American contractors are going to get tens of billions of dollars to fix, what we destroyed. It makes one wonder if that is why we bombed those places in the first place, after all if you wanted to adhere to things like the Geneva Convention, what we did by bombing those civilian facilities, was a war crime. It hardly matters though, because when you look at our other war crimes, that one seems insignificant.

So far this war has costs us hundreds of billions of dollars and most people can see us spending well over a trillion before we are done, but maybe that was by design. The Military Industrial Complex backed this war and George Bush's reelection to the hilt and now they want their payoff. Destroying a city of over 300,000 in population and then rebuilding it with American tax dollars will make a great payoff for helping George. I think that is why they waited until after the election to attack that city.

For many in America war means the loss of a loved one or a life time of suffering from war wounds. However some Americans become very rich every time we go to war and Iraq is going to be a real bonanza for them.