Day: November 13, 2001

Yesterday, I wrote about Amtrak’s ongoing difficulties and its lame attempt to use the 9/11 terrorist attacks to bolster support for its 30 years of failure. But I forgot to mention a $200 million lawsuit recently filed by the French-Canadian consortium, Bombardier Inc, which alleges that Amtrak’s indecision and failure to abide by its terms of an agreement to build a high speed rail system were responsible for huge cost overruns.

The bottom line over the suit is simple — the high speed trains aren’t very high speed. In fact on some parts of the route that they serve, they actually go slower than the conventional trains that Amtrak took out of service. Both Amtrak and Bombardier are playing the blame game.

Amtrak maintains that Bombardier constantly delayed the project and couldn’t meet Amtrak’s performance requirements. Bombardier, meanwhile, maintains that Amtrak took ridiculously long to make even the most basic of decisions and lied about the quality of its existing track.

According to its lawsuit, for example, Amtrak took two years to decide on the draperies for passenger-car windows, and spent 18 months deciding on what sort of chime to use to alert passengers that doors were closing.

Of bigger concern, Bombardier claims that it repeatedly told Amtrak that the poor quality of its track in some areas would make operating the train at high speeds dangerous. Amtrak insists that since the track was approved by the Federal Railroad Administration, it should have been good enough for Bombardier.

Of course if a government bureaucrat says its safe, it must be so!

Source:

Maker of high-speed train sues Amtrak for $200 million. Don Phillips, Washington Post, November 9, 2001.

I had exact same thought last night, but Steven Den Beste is the first person I’ve seen put it out there — the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan may ironically prevent what was likely to be the first major famine of the 21st century.

Even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Afghanistan was on the verge of starvation. During the Spring and Summer of 2001 the Taliban did everything they could to block the United Nations and non-governmental relief agencies from doing their jobs (including regular arrests of aid workers).

With the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. reaction, the situation became even worse, and both relief agencies and many Leftists were predicting that the U.S. war would end up killing hundreds of thousands from famine alone. Some on the nutty Left such as Noam Chomsky went so far as to claim that the United States was carrying out genocide.

But now that Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul have fallen to Northern Alliance forces, the reality may just be the opposite of what the critics predicted. With the Taliban out of the way, effective relief efforts might actually put Afghanistan’s hunger problem on a far better footing than it has been in years.

Hmmm . . . if this scenario plays out, I wonder if those critics will give the U.S. credit for ending famine conditions that the Taliban had been unable and unwilling to prevent? Don’t count on it.