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Stop saying Iraq is another Vietnam. It's another Enron!

The pundits have been saying for some time that there are eerie comparisons between the ill-fated Vietnam war and the present Iraq War. There doubtlessly are! On any view there has been needless killing and mayhem of both Americans and Iraqis and devastation of Iraq itself. The whole country seems to be one gigantic war-zone. Certainly some 2 million people have been internally displaced - and there are another 2 million people who have fled the country.

The Huffington Post [reproduced on AlterNet] puts another complexion on the whole Iraq fiasco comparing it with the excesses and criminality associated with the so-called Enron affair:

"Iraq is Enron, and President Bush is Ken Lay. He's fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. The Bush administration fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq, and cooked the books to keep us there. "The surge" is simply another in a long series of inflated stock quotes.

This past weekend Marcel Marceau passed away at age 84. Doctors say he went quietly. Thus proving that evil thrives when good men stay silent. And just like with Enron, the good men and women who are blowing the whistle on Iraq contractor fraud are being vilified, fired, demoted, and those are the lucky ones.

Last Friday morning the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing entitled "The Mistreatment of Iraq Contracting Whistleblowers," just in time to make the Friday news dump. According to the committee more than $10 billion dollars in Iraq reconstruction and military support contracts is unaccounted for.

In other words, for every six dollars spent in Iraq one dollar is in question. And folks, it's a war-zone, you're dealing with a culture known for its haggling skills, so you've got factor in a little skimming, but this is ridiculous. If you stole that much money from the Mafia you'd be dead.

Vicente Fox may have called President Bush a "windshield cowboy," but Bush has certainly turned Iraq into a wild, wild, west. And here's another one from the War in Iraq's this-is going-to-make-you-vomit file. Some Iraq contract whistleblowers have been vilified and fired, others have been detained by the US military and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques."

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