Bringing Iraq Freedom

Well, America and Bush certainly honor their commitments. In the ever changing justifications for invading Iraq was one really worth remembering: 'we are bringing freedom to the Iraqi's'. How noble and honorable. Why would anyone quibble with grand aims such as that? Surely this would regain some of the respect America lost upon the commencement of the war.

It seems our high ideals have slipped a little bit over the years:

The US State Department is winding down its $20 billion reconstruction program in Iraq and the only new rebuilding money in its latest budget request is for prisons, officials said on Tuesday.

State Department Iraq coordinator James Jeffrey told reporters he was asking Congress for $100 million for prisons but no other big building projects were in the pipeline for the department's 2006 supplemental and 2007 budget requests for Iraq....

"This is the one bit of construction we will be doing - $100 million for additional bed capacity for the Iraqi legal system," he said.

Now there are some people who don't believe this is necessarily the best use of America's dollars and that this building program is not really well thought out. For a country that takes tremendous pride in the slogan 'Land of the free and the brave', the building of more prisons is a betrayal:

Experts on Iraq reconstruction said it was notable that the only new rebuilding money was for prisons after the public relations disaster caused by the eruption of the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison where US forces abused Iraqi inmates.

"For a country like the United States that is promoting the advancement of freedom, building jails is not necessarily your best image," said Rick Barton of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The initial goal of the US rebuilding program was to improve the lives of Iraqis by fixing the country's dilapidated infrastructure and to polish America's image at the same time.

How many other countries will be interested in American freedom now?
Posted on The Human Stain