Fruits of war?

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Editorial: Obama, Clinton see a way for U.S. to exit Iraq



You have to read between the lines in their Tuesday testimony at U.S. Senate hearings, but according to Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the reality in Iraq remains grim. There have been some gains, but they are "uneven" as well as "fragile and reversible."...


Fruits of war?
Vietnam suffered so much: two decades of war with the U.S. that left two million Vietnamese dead, a million missing, the countryside littered with toxic chemicals like Agent Orange that have caused thousands of birth defects, and bombs that still blow up and kill or maim poor farmers and villagers, men and women and children. That's not to mention the state of Vietnam's infrastructure and economy when the war was over, which the U.S. promised to help reconstruct but never did. But then the U.S. always prefers to blow things up rather than reconstruct them. In Iraq, the reconstruct bidding process has been criticized for including only a handful of companies, some with substantial political clout and none of which is based outside the United States. There was so much death and destruction and carnage 58,000 Americans were killed as well, and 150,000 were wounded and all for what? To stop communism? And in Iraq, stop terrorist after we killed almost 1,000,000 in the Gulf two wars and have left millions of refugees! Vietnam today is as capitalist as it is communist, with ads for cars, cell phones and credit cards filling the streets, as well as lots of foreign businessmen eager to set up new factories and most of their exports go to the U.S.!
Ted Rudow III,MA