Whether or not you believe American troops can ultimately succeed in Iraq (by some measure or other), we should be asking whether the effort is worth the over 450 billion dollars the attempt has cost us to date. (See the National Priorities Project website for a running tally and what all that money might have bought us instead.) Worse, some projections for the total cost of the war, assuming troops remain in Iraq until 2010, top two trillion dollars.
A new study by Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes concludes that the total costs of the Iraq war could top the $2 trillion mark. Reuters reports this total, which is far above the US administration’s prewar projections, takes into account the long term healthcare costs for the 16,000 US soldiers injured in Iraq so far.
(Here’s the link to the CS monitor story.)
If it’s my money, I think I’d prefer to see it spent in other ways.
The Democratic candidates are arguing about when and how to withdraw, not whether to withdraw.
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I’d say more but the site seems to be acting up again.
I had the impression that all but the most pitiful commentators had admitted that our Iraq strategy was a failure. The debate currently is one of surge up or go home.
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Not to say that the neocons won’t lie by saying it’s working when it isn’t, but the question seems to be “Is the surge working, or is it time to withdraw?”
Bush himself admitted that a change of course was needed. There was a lot of fretting after the Iraq Study Group released its report, a report which, very politely said, the Iraq occupation has been a foul screw-up. So Bush petulantly decided to do the un-ISG thing and call for a surge.
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Thus, Republican arguments for the war hangs on the slender thread of the success of the surge. They are already stoking the Great Obfuscation Machine. They have worked hard at moving the goal line. They are sending apologists, like Pollack and O’Hanlan, clothed as critiques to, as Keith Olberman says, “sign the press release”. They are digging around for any statistic they can find.
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They’ desperate: By the most important measure, as I argued last Friday, the surge has failed. In fact, things are worse than before the surge.
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The Nation had a recent article about rules of engagement would indicate that our occupation is thoroughly counter-productive.
Not, “is surge working, or is it time to withdraw?” but rather, “whether or not surge is working, is continuing this war a good investment for the U.S.?”
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I think there are so many ways to answer the latter question “no” – but let’s try one that should appeal to independents and Republicans.
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There are approximately 130 million taxpayers in the US – if the war has cost $450B so far, that’s about $3500 for each of us; if it ultimately does cost $2 trillion, we’re talking more like $15,000 each. This is a good chunk of change for most families – imposed on us by the same president who thought tax cuts saving us a mere $300 annually on average were a critical policy priority. To put it another way, it will take the average taxpayer 50 years to recoup through the Bush tax cut what the Bush war is projected to cost over seven years.
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Republicans say that they are for small government, frugality, and lowering taxes. What elected Republicans do is another matter.
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Was it frugal or cost effective for Reagan to invest in “Star Wars”? Resoundingly not. Everything one hears about this project indicates that may never work and, if it does, a huge expenditure will be needed.
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Why have both recent 2-term Republican Presidents insisted on running up huge deficits?
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If you judge them by their actions, you will see that they are spendthrifts on military hardware but radical misers on such stuff as the health of poor children — to take a recent Bush veto threat.
Republicans say that they are for small government, frugality, and lowering taxes. What elected Republicans do is another matter.
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…the way that I’d put it is what people who elect the elected Republican politicians want is another matter.
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Republican politicians learned long ago that they need to cater to constituencies who love their welfare. Farmers. Defense contractors (and by that, I include their employees). The prison-industrial-congressional complex. Who the Republicans don’t want to cater to are what Reagan pejoratively referred to as “Cadillac welfare queens,” and they make that clear.
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But the farmers, defense contractors and prison-industrial-congressional complex people are, are largely welfare queens. But, to the Republicans, they are “our” kind of welfare queens, not the “other” kind of welfare queens. And therein lies the difference.
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The Germans(!) have a word for it. “Scheinheilig.” It is loosely translated into Amerikanisch as “hypocrite.” but if the word is actually broken down it means “wants to appear (schein) holy (heilig). And that’s what Republicans want to be seen as.
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As a side note, I would heartily recommend renting Robert Greenwald’s documentary The Selling Of Iraq. That will high-light some of the themes above about defense contractors. BTW, there was a hillarious SciFi story by, I believe it was Philip K. Dick about governments paying for armaments, and then paying to have them destroyed.
…War is a continuation of politics by other means.
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What is the GWBush malAdministration’s desired goal in Iraq? And what were the politics that drove them to war in the first place? The answers to the second question change from day to day. And I do not believe that we have ever heard enunciated a consistent or coherent answer to the first question.
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As to the latter, Josh Marshall’s website has a series of humorous posts where he indicates that GWBush is still trying to link bin Laden to Iraq, this time indirectly. What Marshall suggests is that a US withdrawal from Iraq will merely embolden the bin Laden-type terrorists to attack American interests. That’s about as stupid as if the Nixon administration were to have suggested that US pulling out of South Vietnam would have emboldened the North Vietnam to invade San Francisco.
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To return to my theme above (What is the GWBush malAdministration’s desired goal in Iraq?) what will happen if the GWBush malAdmininstration’s desired goal is not what the Iraqis want? That is the real question, isn’t it–what Iraqis want? Lebanon, another made up state (by the French in the aftermath of WWI) appears to have been in a condition of civil war off-and-on since 1975. Iraq is another state that was constructed by the Europeans and, to a lesser extent, Americans in the aftermath of WWI for their commercial benefit. How long is that civil war in Iraq going to continue, and, more importantly, how much longer is the US going to be involved in it? And how long will it be before the Americans discover what Reagan did with his indiscriminant insertion of American Marines in Beirut in 1982, 241 of whom were blown up.
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Note to the poster: there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics. The so-called “Nobel Prize in Economics” is awarded by the central bank in Sweden (if memory serves) and it goes something like “in memory of Alfred Nobel.” It is most definitely not awarded by the Royal Academy.
Is a direct quote from the CS Monitor – you will need to take your clarification re Nobel prize up with them!