{"id":58,"date":"2003-07-25T07:21:01","date_gmt":"2003-07-25T11:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=58"},"modified":"2003-07-25T07:21:01","modified_gmt":"2003-07-25T11:21:01","slug":"lugar-denounces-reconstruction-effort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=58","title":{"rendered":"Lugar Denounces Reconstruction Effort"},"content":{"rendered":"

Senator Lugar is upset <\/a> with the Bush administration and the ‘surprises’ they continually foist upon the budgeting committees to the point he suggested they needed ”the discipline of actually constructing a budget for four years.” <\/i><\/p>\n

He also claimed the reason reconstruction plans weren’t worked on long before the actual invasion was political. They didn’t want to appear as if the decision to attack had already been made.<\/p>\n

His early questioning of WH administrators as to where the money would come from were shrugged off. ”No problem — oil, oil, oil.” <\/i><\/p>\n

Well it is a problem. As predicted months ago oil revenues would be woefully inadequate and this appears to be the case.<\/p>\n

Edward C. Chow, a former Chevron Corp. executive serving as a visiting scholar at Carnegie, estimated that one-third of Iraq’s oil revenues need to be reinvested into an oil industry that has fallen into disrepair. The remaining two-thirds need to be spent on importing basic necessities. <\/p>\n

”In my mind, there is no oil money available to go into any sector but oil,” Chow said in an interview. <\/i><\/p>\n

The White House says it has no current plans for any four or five-year budget.<\/p>\n

”We don’t know what the costs are,” Buchan said. ”We’ve talked about the ’04 budget process. We haven’t even put forward costs for ’04, because at this point we can’t accurately estimate them.” <\/p>\n

Administration officials are beginning to provide a glimpse into the level of need in the war-torn country. On Wednesday, L. Paul Bremer III, the administration’s civilian administrator in Iraq, said $13 billion will be required to meet ”foreseeable power demands,” and another $16 billion will be needed over the next four years ”just getting decent water to the population.” <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Senator Lugar is upset with the Bush administration and the ‘surprises’ they continually foist upon the budgeting committees to the point he suggested they needed ”the discipline of actually constructing a budget for four years.” He also claimed the reason … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}