Marshall Adame, a 2008 Democratic Candidate for Congress in North Carolina’s 3rd District, holds up The Sandi Group as an exemplary contractor in Iraq.
The Sandi Gourp’s chairman, Rubar Sandi, apparently hired Adame to work on Sandi’s plan to launch an airline. Adame had just finished with his position as the former Basra airport director for the Coalition Provisional Authority:
Rubar smiled and told me that he felt, when I walked into his office, that we would work together and that he was sure I was the man he needed in Iraq. “You can stay” he said.
Standing up for Sandi, a key player in the controversial Adnan Palace project through the Sandi affiliate Corporate Bank Financial Service, is a sign of true bipartisan loyalty. Political contributions from associated with Corporate Bank) appear to be solely directed to Republicans — $25,000 in June 2005.
Adame repeatedly makes a convincing case for The Sandi Group’s commitment to Iraq reconstruction. But there are plenty of unanswered questions about the company that the Special Inspactor General for Iraq Reconstruction is scrutinizing. Here’s one review of Sandi’s Corporate Bank’s performance under DynCorp’s police training program.
And why won’t Sandi answer questions about Sandi’s managers known as Saba and Nashact? Some say Iraqi officials arrested the two managers last summer for plundering the salaries of the company’s Iraqi workers….. A Sandi executive who spoke glowingly of the two declined to comment on the whereabouts of Saba and Nashact or the allegations that the were arrested.
Here’s Adame’s blog post with TPMCafe.
It may make you throw up, but Iraq is indeed enireiexcpng a booming economy.Lest you think the source is some righty site, it’s from Newsweek.”Roadside bombs account for fewer backups than the sheer number of secondhand cars that have crowded onto the nation’s roads-five times as many in Baghdad as before the war. Cheap Chinese goods overflow from shop shelves, and store owners report quick turnover. Real-estate prices have risen several hundred percent, suggesting that Iraqis are more optimistic about the future than most Americans are.”A civil war is when elements from inside the country are attempting to take over the government. Since the primary source of fighters/money is actually from outside governments I’m skeptical the term fits. Whatever term you want to use, it seems clear that right now we are unfortunately treading water when it comes to fighting the terrorists in Iraq. Since the enemy uses guerrilla tactics mandated by the fact they can’t take us on head on the never ending trickle from outside is enough to keep us from victory. We kill them, they send in more.Fortunately the war is multi faceted in that part of what we are doing is a holding action while we bring Iraqi resources up to speed. Part of the problem is that a central tenet of the enemy is that America won’t stay the course but bug out. Since half our government is encouraging them in that view (thanks Dems!!) and it isn’t politically feasible to take on the governments who are actually fighting us we are stuck in this position for now.However, once the Iraqi government is able to take over things there will be a tremendous shift in this war. It won’t be possible to think that the Iraqi government is going to bug out and leave the fight. Further, the Iraqi’s will have the ability to drop the hammer on enemy forces in a way that we can’t/won’t. Finally, while there is a lingering mistrusts of cooperating with American forces (in large part due to bad past experience — thanks GHWB!) that fear won’t be in place when the Iraqis are in control.