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Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Credulousness at NPR 
National Public Radio promoted this story thus:

"Stay tuned to find out why manufacturing in Iraq is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein."

Hmmm. Sounds interesting.

Until I found out that this dolt based her story on the complaints of heads of State-owned industries!!!!

She took this guy's word at face value?

The fact that demand has been inadequate to bring Saddam's former state-owned factories to 100% capacity does not speak to the failure of US policy. It is not our responsibility to make Saddam's former henchmen rich.

Rather, it speaks to the sheer corruption of Saddam's Iraq before the war. The fact is that state-owned businesses were tightly controlled by Saddam Hussein, and control of them was awarded to loyal sheikhs. That is a large part of how Saddam stayed in power.

And as the economy went into the toilet as a result of years of sanctions, Saddam simply ensured their loyalty through the twin policies of enriching them with land and oil-for-food dollars (Thanks, Kofi!!!!!) while simultaneously making it known that any dissent would be met with a feet-first date with a plastic shredder. After the opportunity to watch one's wife and children raped, tortured, or killed.

The NPR reporter misses all of that. She misses the fact that any demand prior to the war was totally artificial.

I'm sure she still believes in the tooth fairy, too.

Splash, out

Jason

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