I Remember A Poster

When I was a teen, our church's youth group class room had a bunch of posters. I remember one that carried a great message. It was a picture of a 3 or 4 year old little girl, giving a bowl of milk to a neglected looking kitten. The message of the poster was, the grandest good intention was worthless when compared to the smallest of good deeds.

The Neo-cons led us into Iraq with lies and promises. The lied about the threat that Saddam presented to us, and promised us a new peaceful democratic Iraq. While selling the idea of a new better Iraq, the Bush administration presented us with a series of grand plans, and good intentions to make the brutality worthwhile.

An example of a grand intention being worth less than a smallest of good deeds can be seen in one of our Iraq rebuilding projects.

A reconstruction contract for the building of 142 primary health centers across Iraq is running out of money, after two years and roughly $200 million, with no more than 20 clinics now expected to be completed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says.

The initial plan was grand, 200 clinics, to be the backbone of the medical delivery system for the nation. This was to be a training ground for the doctors of the nations, a means of assuring health for the people of a nation, and a sign of the tangible benefits of the US attack on Iraq.

Now, if everything goes right, they have twenty, one million dollar clinics, that cost ten million dollars a piece to build. There are a number of understandable reasons for the failure to finish the project, security, insurgency, weather, contractor issues, but these don't matter. A failed grand good intention is still a failure.

The end result, another series of unfinished projects that fall well short of meeting the needs of the nation, and another mess that has to be fixed somehow.


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Iraq