corrente

There were any number of points JF Kerry raised in the debate the other night which havent' gotten nearly the attention they deserve. For one, his mention of the "14 bases" that we really shouldn't be building in Iraq if we want to have the slightest credibility when claiming we're not there to colonize their asses.

The other was his unspeakably cruel mention of the fact that during the "catastrophic success" which was the Battle of Bagdhad, we guarded the Oil Ministry but not, well, anything else. Surely in a year and a half we've at least managed to find useful work for all the scientists and engineers unemployed since the Weapons of Mass Destruction (Program Related Proposal Activities etc.) were shut down? Suuuure we have....

(via AP, via Jackson MS Clarion-Ledger

The dangers of Baghdad and a shortage of cash have set back the U.S. effort to put Iraqi weapons scientists to work rebuilding their country and keep them off the global job market for makers of doomsday arms.

To steer them to civilian projects and training, the State Department had planned a dozen workshops and seminars for hundreds of idled specialists from Iraq's old nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, beginning in the first half of 2004.

It also envisioned an early project, a desalination plant, as a model for other ventures employing scientists, engineers and technicians who once built weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear physicists might work in radiotherapy, for example, and chemists at environmental monitoring stations.

But the department got no new funds for the program, and none of these plans has gotten off the ground, nine months after U.S. officials said they would "jump-start" the initiative to discourage weapons experts from emigrating and offering their services to the highest bidder.

In fact, the program's on-the-ground manager arrived in Baghdad only three weeks ago.

Prospects for the jobs-for-scientists program had dimmed when the Bush administration, facing a projected $521 billion budget deficit this year, "flat-lined" spending in many areas. Its request to Congress calls for the same $50 million for this purpose in fiscal year 2005 as allocated in 2004, when all of it was spent on a continuing, 12-year-old program in the former Soviet Union to employ ex-weapons builders. No new money is specified for Iraq.

Iraq's new Ministry of Science and Technology pays stipends of about $50 to $200 a month to hundreds of others. But this "is not enough to stabilize them," said Obeidi, who left Iraq last year for the United States and was a director of Iraq's Military Industrialization Commission.

So we can't afford to protect chemical plants and subways in the US because of the danged budged deficit, and we also can't keep WMD scientists off the breadlines because of same. Anybody noticing a theme here?