NO!
Put the shoe on another foot: Russia invades Afghanistan, destroys the country, and then demands that the Afghanis pay for the cost of reconstruction to Russian corporations.
Or better yet, Iraq invades the US, destroys the American infrastructure, kills upwards of 1.25 million in the course of nightmarish devastation and adds insult to injury by demanding through a quisling government that the American people pay for its own reconstruction. How would that sit with the American people?
Asking Iraq to pay for its own reconstruction is insane, reprehensible and unbelievably immoral.
First, before the illegal invasion, the Bush administration told the American people that Iraqi oil would pay for the reconstruction. What presumption! - to commit resources of the sovereign nation of Iraq to a project without the consent of the Iraqi people.
Now, after dumping billions into a very ineffective, inept reconstruction effort, Americans want the Iraqis to pay for the destruction and devastation that American forces (both mercenary and DOD) have wreaked?
Utter nonsense! Alice had less illogic to deal with in Wonderland.
Like many other facets of this atrocity, the American people were lied to; the invasion and 5-year occupation and suppression of the resultant civil war have been far costlier in all terms than Rumsfeld and the others guestimated.
The proposition that the Iraqi people should pay for the ghastly mess that the Bush administration has made of their country should be abhorrent to any civilized, fair-minded person.
It should be said again that the number of Iraqis who have been murdered in this conflict are estimated to be in excess of 1.25 million. That is a horrendous death toll. The USA is morally obligated to pay restitution for these lives and reparations for the destruction of the Iraq.
Moreover, the companies paid to rebuild Iraq must be Iraqi-owned companies, not American companies. The self-evident righteousness of that proviso should be accepted as an unquestionable moral imperative by which the American people might regain a sense of decency and respectability.
