Mark Kennedy: “And we absolutely saw that. People might ask if everything is so great over there, why do we need this money to rebuild…”

“And we absolutely saw that. People might ask if everything is so great over there, why do we need this money to rebuild Iraq. Well, I want to point out, it was not due to the war. As we went through Baghdad, and I am sure the gentleman from South Carolina saw the same things, we saw specific buildings, specific floors on buildings that were targeted and that were hit, but right beside that there would be a building standing and continuing in commerce today. But what has caused a need for reconstruction is the fact that Saddam Hussein spent one-third of total income on armaments, and we are constantly recovering huge caches of arms in palaces. We were in one palace complex in Tikrit that had 112 buildings on the palace compound, each one of which could be called a palace itself. When you spend money in such awful ways on destructive things and neglect the people, that is what we are recovering from. We are not recovering from the war. That damage was very tightly focused.”