am i the only one that thinks this is a crock of shit?
I was in favor of the war and all but damn shouldnt we use some of Iraqs oil money to pay for their reconstruction? That was what Bush said would happen in the beginning didnt he?

There are two considerations here Amish:

1. Iraq's oil revenues were never to be appropriated for American expenses, like those paid in this defense supplemental. The revenues were supposed to go to reconstruction of Iraq.

2. My guess is the money has been slow in coming. While the physical infrastructure survived, the bureaucratic infrastructure did not. Even if the Iraqis are playing an honest game-- which they probably aren't-- it's probably taken them this long just to figure out how to convert the oil revenues into useful cash for the government, instead of slush funds intended for Saddam & his cronies.

Just an opinion, nothing to back it up.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

1)i may be wrong... but i thought that in the first 87 billion supplemental (the one Kerry voted for/against) only part of it went to fund the troops. Like 20 billion. And the rest went to reconstruction.could someone help me with this? My memory sucks.
2)im sure the Iraqis are inexperienced at setting up governments-but we arent. I think the flow of funds from oil companies(many of them american) to an Iraqi interim gov(controlled by us)should be pretty smooth.

I do believe we were mislead about a few things before we got into this war. This is one of the bigger ones.

Amish--

From the OMB documentation

-- $65.6B went to DoD
-- $21.4B went to the Coalition Provisional Authority
-- $140M went to the State Department

(http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/amendments/supplemental_9_17_03.pdf#search='$87%20billion%20supplemental')

While one could argue that the $21.4B should've been paid out of Iraq's pocket, my guess is we wanted the flexibility to fund projects we found valuable.

You may recall that ultimately most of that money got re-directed to funding Iraqi National Guard and Militia.

As for whether we were mislead in this account, I don't have the information handy to defend my suspiscion that Iraqi-generated funds are being put to fairly good use right now. Trouble is, Googling for "Iraqi oil money" only brings up the U.N. scandal.

If I find something else, I'll let you know.

thanx. Looks like i got my figures backwards. I wonder if the other suplements will be spread out in the same proportion? do you think that all the money set aside for reconstruction has already been spent or is this all for military use? Does anybody have a semi exact figure as to how much we have spent in total? How much money are the Iraqis contributing?

thanx again dude.