Replies to post #106588 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

Faces of the fallen

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http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen/

[BOREALIS]

Total Cost of Wars Since 2001


http://costofwar.com/

[BullNBear52]

I was already skewered by both sides over that war. Neither one could come up with an honest answer defending their position.

[StephanieVanbryce]

I hate to say this Borealis ..personally I feel I watched Obama give two bj's in less
than 24 hours ...one to bush and then this morning to bibi ...

This is not to take away from the 'formal' end of combat operations in Iraq..he kept his promise.

.. I'm not forgetting .. that the leaders of this country get away with lying us into war, breaking our laws and suffer no consequences for it ..and I know just like you we will not forget ONE MAN, not even ONE .. who suffered torture under the hands of the murdering bush admn..

[StephanieVanbryce]

Turn the page on Mister Bush? Never

Tue Aug 31, 2010 at 08:04:54 PM PDT

I'm a big believer in mercy and forgiveness. And second chances. Had people in my life failed to forgive, chosen to be merciless, rejected the idea that those who've gone astray can improve themselves and make amends, there's every likelihood I'd have spent several decades in the slam or died there. Luckily, some people reached out to me, gave me a second chance, helped me rescue myself. I've tried to follow their lead for a lot of years.

So I understand why President Obama underscored his call to "turn the page" regarding Iraq tonight by revealing that he had phoned President Bush. "It's well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset," Obama said. "Yet no one could doubt President Bush's support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security."

I'd like to be able to agree. Really, I would.

However, unlike President Obama, I could and did and do doubt Bush's support for the troops, love of country and commitment to our security. And I can wrest no mercy from the bitterness and rage that I feel every time I remember what he and the pack of thugs around him accomplished for the troops, the country and our security.

I cannot and will not turn the page until George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the others in that cabal of scorpions are brought to justice and make amends for Iraq. Which means never. No apology, much less time in the slam. I'll go to my grave knowing Bush and the rest got away with it. In a couple of months, Bush hopes hundreds of thousands of Americans will be turning the pages of his memoir, a book certain to add to the plethora of lies and pathetic, murderous rationalizations with which we became so familiar during the last seven years of his presidency.

With a bayonet called 9/11, and a script of concoctions and fabrications, President Bush and his buddies prodded the nation into an illegal preventive war, a war of aggression, in utter violation of the U.N. Charter. First came the lies, so many it was impossible to keep up even for Congresspeople, whose job it supposedly is to keep up. Then came the shock and awe, the torture, the secret prisons, the no-bid contracts, the pitiful claims that there was no insurgency.

And the endless flow of blood.

There was the pathetic aircraft carrier spectacle six weeks into it that the war was over. And when that proved untrue, there was the lie about how Bush didn’t play golf anymore because he found it inappropriate while American soldiers were dying.

There's a long list of the dead who would not be dead were it not for this war initiated out of bravado and doctored evidence. Thousands of dead Americans, and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, most of whom didn't make it to any list. Deaths in any war are terrible enough. Deaths in a war of choice, a fabricated war, count as nothing short of murder.

Even before George W. Bush was plopped into the Oval Office on a 5-to-4 vote, the men he came to front for were already plotting their rationale for sinking deeper military and economic roots into the Middle East, petropolitics and neo-imperialist sophistry greedily intertwined. When they stepped into office, as Richard Clarke later explained to us, terrorism gave them no worries. They focused, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later informed us, on finding the right excuse to persuade the American people to go to war with Saddam Hussein as a prelude to going to war with some of his neighbors. In less than nine months, that excuse dropped into their laps in the form of Osama bin Laden's kamikaze crews.

From that terrible day forward, Richard Cheney and his sidekick Donald Rumsfeld and their like-minded cohort of rogues engineered the invasion with nods from Bush. Like the shrewd opportunists they showed themselves to be in the business world, they saw the chance to carry out their invasion plan and they moved every obstacle - most especially the truth - out of their way to make it happen.

When they couldn't get the CIA to give them the intelligence that would justify their moves they exerted pressure for a change of minds. They exaggerated, reinterpreted and rejiggered intelligence assessments. When all else failed, they brewed their own assessments.

They created a cabal of renegades specifically to carry out the Project for a New American Century's plans for Middle East hegemony. They didn't carefully weigh options and evaluate the pros and cons and make errors in judgment. They studiously ignored everyone who warned them against taking the action they had decided upon years before the World Trade Centers were turned to ashes and dust.

They ignored Brent Scowcroft when he wrote in August 2002, "Don't Attack Saddam." They ignored the Army War College when it warned of the perils of invasion and occupation in a February 2003 report, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, And Missions For Military Forces In A Post-Conflict Scenario". [ http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=182 ]

When their propaganda failed to measure up as a justification for expending American lives and treasure, Bush and his buddies invented evidence. Aluminum tubes that experts said could in no way be used to help make nuclear weapons were turned into prima facie evidence of Saddam's intent to do so. Documents that intelligence veterans said from the get-go were forged remained the basis for the necessity of invasion. With the straightest face he'd mustered since taking the oath of office, Bush declared: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

Senators and Representatives were lied into granting the President authority to take military action to protect the United States from a threat that didn't exist.

When the weapons inspectors under Hans Blix couldn't find any the nukes that were supposedly being designed and built, but asked for more time to look, Bush and his buddies brushed him off and began pounding Baghdad and other Iraqi targets with a display of raw power they labeled, like ad writers for some ultimate cologne, "Shock and Awe."

Every smidgen of this betrayal of the American people was purposely calculated, even if poorly planned and incompetently handled. The pretense that Bush hadn't made up his mind months before the invasion was yet another lie. It was a ploy to suggest falsely that the President and the ideological crocodiles in the White House gave two snaps about cooperating with the international community other than as a means to camouflage their unalterable determination to stomp Iraq, plundering it under the guise of righteous magnanimity.

Torture approved at the highest levels was a deliberate, premeditated policy of international outlawry and inhumanity guided by legal arguments requested and approved by the man who soon got his reward, appointment as attorney general, and carried out on the direct orders of men like General Geoffrey Miller at the "suggestion" of Don Rumsfeld and under the command of George Walker Bush.

Into battle, Bush sent men and women who were ill-equipped for their mission. How many died because their personal armor or the armor of the vehicles they traveled in failed? Did the Commander-in-Chief demand that this armor be upgraded with all due haste? No. He chose instead to believe his key advisers' claims that there were no insurgents, just the need for a little mopping up of minor resistance. It would all be over in a few months. No urgency for added armor. As for taking care of those whose failed armor allowed them to be wounded or permanently maimed? Bush proposed budget cuts for veterans health care.

He and his buddies betrayed us with their lies and placed us, as Americans, at greater risk throughout the world. They worked overtime to silence dissident voices. They deliberately took us into war under a cloak of deceit, poured billions of our dollars into holes we still don't know all the locations of, encouraged al Qaeda to spread its operations to Iraq and transformed a dictator's fiefdom into a hellhole of sectarian violence in which civilians died in the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands.

Support for the troops? Love of the country? Commitment to security? Not hardly.

So, no, I won't be turning the page on George W. Bush even though the war he and his cronies engineered is now officially ended. That would mean being merciful to someone who has had plenty of second chances all his life and botched each of them.

Iraq put the icing on.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/8/31/897917/-Turn-the-page-on-Mister-Bush-Never

[BOREALIS]

The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond

By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
Sunday, September 5, 2010

Writing in these pages in early 2008, [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702846.html ] we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq,[ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/31/AR2010083104496.html ] it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?

The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.

Afghanistan

The Iraq invasion diverted our attention from the Afghan war, now entering its 10th year. While "success" in Afghanistan might always have been elusive, we would probably have been able to assert more control over the Taliban, and suffered fewer casualties, if we had not been sidetracked. In 2003 -- the year we invaded Iraq -- the United States cut spending in Afghanistan to $14.7 billion (down from more than $20 billion in 2002), while we poured $53 billion into Iraq. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, we spent at least four times as much money in Iraq as in Afghanistan.

It is hard to believe that we would be embroiled in a bloody conflict in Afghanistan today if we had devoted the resources there that we instead deployed in Iraq. A troop surge in 2003 -- before the warlords and the Taliban reestablished control -- would have been much more effective than a surge in 2010. [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/01/AR2009120101231.html ]

Oil

When the United States went to war in Iraq, the price of oil was less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around that level. With the war, prices started to soar, reaching $140 a barrel by 2008. We believe that the war and its impact on the Middle East, the largest supplier of oil in the world, were major factors. Not only was Iraqi production interrupted, but the instability the war brought to the Middle East dampened investment in the region.

In calculating our $3 trillion estimate two years ago, we blamed the war for a $5-per-barrel oil price increase. We now believe that a more realistic (if still conservative) estimate of the war's impact on prices works out to at least $10 per barrel. That would add at least $250 billion in direct costs to our original assessment of the war's price tag. But the cost of this increase doesn't stop there: Higher oil prices had a devastating effect on the economy.

Federal debt

There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.

As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis -- and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.

The financial crisis

The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war. Higher oil prices meant that money spent buying oil abroad was money not being spent at home. Meanwhile, war spending provided less of an economic boost than other forms of spending would have. Paying foreign contractors working in Iraq was neither an effective short-term stimulus (not compared with spending on education, infrastructure or technology) nor a basis for long-term growth.

Instead, loose monetary policy and lax regulations kept the economy going -- right up until the housing bubble burst, bringing on the economic freefall.

Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.

The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.

* * *

Reimagining history is a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, it seems clear that without this war, not only would America's standing in the world be higher, our economy would be stronger. The question today is: Can we learn from this costly mistake?

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, was chairman of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. Linda J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. They are co-authors of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html