I love the irony. Hurrah for Iraq standing on principle.

“You don’t do the work, you don’t get paid.”

Iraq Halts Contract Payments to Raytheon, Maersk, Official Says

March 22 (Bloomberg) — Iraq’s interim government is refusing to make payments on some contracts with foreign companies including Raytheon Co. and A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S because they overcharged or failed to deliver everything they promised, an official said.

`It’s a problem all ministries are dealing with because of the lack of paperwork provided by the U.S.-led administration on contracts they signed before handing over power in June,” Iraq’s deputy transport minister, Atta Nabil Hussain Auni Atta, said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan, on March 21.

Atta, 63 and a 30-year veteran at the ministry, said Raytheon hasn’t delivered an air-traffic control system to Baghdad airport, and the government is withholding a $19 million payment. James Fetig, a spokesman for the Waltham, Massachusetts- based defense contractor, declined to comment on the matter.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, led by U.S. Ambassador Paul Bremer, awarded billions of dollars of contracts to foreign companies including Halliburton Co. during the 14 months it administered Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime.

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Maybe Bush’s spread of democracy around the world is a good thing. We can’t stand up to Bush here because we are now in a Theocracy, but new Democracies can. What goes around comes around.