http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18043.htm
Part III
"So the money is going to come from Iraqi Oil..."
Google the above phrase and what do you get?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22So+the+money+is+going+to+come+from+Iraqi+Oil...%22
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3532
Presenter: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
October 02, 2003 1:30 PM EDT
Rumsfeld: In any event, the only estimates I've seen are $50 (billion) to $75 billion by various international institutions, and that is a guess. And think of the range -- 50 to 75. (Chuckles.) It is obviously a guess. Now, those people who do that obviously have some basis for saying that. I don't know that that number's right. We've never said that that number's right. We have -- I have said that that's the only number I have heard. No one I know believes that the United States taxpayers ought to pay any significant fraction of that. We do know that the funds for whatever the number may prove to be, the bulk of it's going to be paid by the Iraqi people.
Q: The $20 billion --
Rumsfeld: Just a minute.
Q: -- is a significant fraction of --
Rumsfeld: Just a minute. Just a minute.
It's going to be paid by the Iraqi people, and it's going to be paid over a period of years. The taxpayers of the United States don't have an obligation to go in and refashion Iraq into a 21st century country. It suffered under 30-plus years of Saddam Hussein with a Stalinist-like economy, denying the infrastructure, building palaces, killing people, torturing people. And it is no one else's job to go in and fix that.
Now, what will actually happen? We want to help get it jump-started. So the money is going to come from Iraqi oil revenue, as everyone has said. They think it's going to be something like $2 billion this year; they think it might be something like 15 -- 12 next year; they think it might be something like 18 to 20-plus the next -- 19? --
Myers: Nineteen --
Rumsfeld: -- the next year. And you start adding that up, and if their government -- to operate their government is something like $15 billion, in a year or two they begin to get some margin where they can begin investing themselves.
Last edited on Thu Jul 19th, 2007 07:59 pm by Joe Kelley
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