War reparations

Well, here's an idea that will never be adopted, I know, but I thought I'd tell you about it anyway. I want to share an article with you entitled, "Why We Should Pay War Reparations To Iraq":

We recently learned that the $30 billion the United States allocated to "reconstruct" Iraq is about to run out. That seems like a whopping amount, until you realize that the World Bank estimates the cost of rebuilding at between $50 billion and $100 billion. This sum does nothing, of course, to compensate Iraqi families for the deaths and immense suffering caused by the invasion.

Withdrawal from Iraq has understandably been the main focus of the peace movement. The problem with this approach is that many concerned Americans have serious reservations about withdrawal, because they fear that we'd be abandoning Iraq to chaos. If, however, withdrawal is linked to hefty reparations payments, this fear could be alleviated. Withdrawal while providing the resources to recover and restore order could lead to domestic peace far more readily than withdrawal by itself.

Reparations are clearly appropriate in an invasion that was justified on false advertising of the Bush administration, which purposely dismissed solid evidence against its dubious claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Before the hardball pundits and opportunist politicians who got us into this mess dismiss reparations as a "non-starter," we should note that there is ample precedent for reparations, the most obvious being that of Iraq itself. Iraq has been forced to shell out more than $19 billion in reparations claims related to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and it owes another $33 billion. The payments, ordered by the U.N. Security Council, have gone to many claimants, including U.S. corporations, according to the U.N. Compensations Commission.
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Making amends through reparations might also help us regain some of the international respect we have lost. Withdrawal coupled with reparations would also deprive terrorists of their most attractive recruiting tool, hatred of a nation that is perceived to be on a pathological crusade against Islam.

In addition to the strategic and moral reasons for getting out and paying reparations, there's an economic argument: Because we've already wasted more than $200 billion in Iraq, reparations might end up costing us less than staying the course, and less than battling the increased terrorism that the occupation has provoked.

Of course, we owe the Iraqis more than money. We owe them repentance. But money would be a start.