Posted by aogFriday, 19 December 2003 at 16:35 TrackBack Ping URL

Jonathan Chait is peddling other inaccuracies in his anti-Howard Dean weblog. Here’s the quote:

it’s also true that Saddam Hussein made some great improvements in Iraqi health care and domestic infrastructure.

This is of course not the case, particularly during the last 12 years or so. The Ba’ath let the infrastructure of everything not in Baghdad decay and even Baghdad wasn’t completely kept up. If Chait really believes this, that would explain part of his belief that the occupation of Iraq hasn’t been doing to well in getting basic infrastructure working. It was already mostly broken before the invasion. Of course, most of the breakage was the result of a combination of the sanctions and Ba’ath policy, but wasn’t Chait one of the ones who supported sanctions instead of invasion? But I guess that’s consistent with believing that the infrastructure in Iraq was well maintained by the Ba’ath regime.