Screed against Bush....And the guys around him. So, last week Bremer gets in front of the camera at a Senate hearing and they are asking him how come some of this money the Bushites want can't come from the sale of Iraq's oil. Well, Bremer starts shifting around in his seat and looking uncomfortable, saying how like all the Iraqi's oil field equipment is old, and the pipelines need refurbishing and all, but the Senators keep pushing, and he finally blurts out that Iraq will need all its money to pay back the 200 billion that they owe. What! Can't we just excuse that debt? Wasn't incurred by that bad guy Saddam? Why do they have to pay his debts??? Well, Bremer says like we're trying to excuse it, or a least some of it, but it turns out that we'll,... uh they'll... just have to pay it. Cause after all it was real money lent to Iraq by real banks that real people put their money into in places like France and Russia and Japan. And the people of Iraq will have to use some of that oil revenue, actually almost all of it, to pay off those debts. Now, remember last February when they were all gearing up to war, they said if there was damage or we incurred expenses, the Iraq oil revenue would be able to pay us for our trouble? Well. I worked in an investment bank on a research project once upon a time (before the internet) and I remember that all the debts owned by various countries were well known and published, and banks bought and sold them as debentures. So, these guys must have known about Iraq's debt before the war, and knew it when they were saying how Iraqi oil would pay the extraordinary costs. So, not only did they lie about the WMD, they also lied about how much all this would cost, and how it would be paid for. Now we are stuck. We can't really expect to go into a country and remove its government and take over without taking responsibility for building things back up again, can we? I hope all those people that voted for Nader, thinking that it didn't matter if they took votes away from Gore because there really wasn't much difference between Gore and Bush are paying attention. I cannot believe this country has gotten into such a fix in three short years. Yes, things would have bad because of the recession and 9/11 but there seems to be an almost willful desire in this administration to make things just as bad as they could possibly be, just so long as the upper upper class is reaping big profits.