B’Man: Let that sink in before reading how Joseph Stiglitz arrives at these numbers (this is minimum). We have no clue about some of the monies. Black Ops, money lost. Medical payments and care for the full 1/3 returning vets with medical issues. Its all from Gorilla’s Guides.
Quick Quote: In his (Stiglitz) discussion he produced two truly dreadful and staggering statistics. US veterans returning from current wars are now committing suicide at the rate of 18 per day – a far higher death toll than on the battlefield.
Wow. Our men and women are killing more of themselves than the “enemy” is. WTF?
Now, I know all you rednecks have an extra $50Grand laying around to help out all those poor military companies who are raping us AND taking our money while doing it. And I know that your patriotic asses don’t mind that when Herr Bush leaves office he will have taken our country’s debt to $9 TRILLION, most due to excessive military costs.
I know that you just lost your job at the factory and you had to drop even that piss-poor Hospitalization insurance you could barely afford anyway. I know that gas has risen a bit, but buckle up and realize you are Americans, by God. Like Bush told the woman working 3 jobs just to make ends meet… “uniquely American” (as if HAVING to work three jobs to get by is some wonderful thing… fucking idiot).
But even beyond all of those really cool things happening to our country, conducted by a bunch of ruthless criminals, things could be worse. We could be the Iraqis who are taking the brunt of all this “help” and “democracy” we are “bringing” them. Enjoy, Mr Iraqi.
(shaking head in total disbelief)
Counting the true cost of war has been a task to daunt the best of thinkers from Thucydides in ancient Athens to the Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz calculating today the real cost of the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier this year he put a figure on the conflict in Iraq – the Three Trillion Dollar War – proportionately one of the most expensive of modern times and, he calculates, more costly to the US economy and society than the ragged Vietnam campaign from the early 60s to 1975.
And he has just revised his calculations sharply upward. In a discussion at the Frontline Club in London this weekend, he said the real bill for the Americans will be around $5tn at least – an impost of about $50,000 per American family.
Of course the burden isn’t only on Americans and their economy. Not least there is the wreckage to the Iraqi economy and community – more than 60% unemployment, families and homes destroyed, half the doctors now working than there were five years ago.
There is an awful lot that is hard, almost impossible to calculate. The string of non-compete contracts to outfits like Haliburton, Blackwater and Dyncor security is very hard to pin down. In the case of the UK there are the orders under urgent operational requirements, for which there is little or no competition, and they are difficult to track because of the complexity of accounting between the Treasury and MoD.
Stiglitz is pretty sure that the extended Iraq war and crisis has played a huge role in the current oil price surge but, he told his London audience, this is hard to define precisely.
In the scrupulous way he crunches statistics and numbers in his book, there is a faint hint of Wilde’s definition of a cynic, the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But it must be said right away that beneath the facts and figures, Joseph Stiglitz cares above all about the value of human life and respect for law, particularly international law.
One of the most shocking revelations in his book is just how much the care of the physically and mentally injured from the current conflicts is going to cost our communities, a brutal truth British administrations have glossed over as much as their US counterparts. He and his co-author Linda Blimes now calculate that up to a third of US soldiers come back from war with mental and physical damage, particularly with post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury (TBI). In families with an injured veteran, at least one member is giving up work to be a full-time carer.
In his discussion he produced two truly dreadful and staggering statistics. US veterans returning from current wars are now committing suicide at the rate of 18 per day – a far higher death toll than on the battlefield. Bush’s military adventures and huge defence expenditure, now around the $600bn mark annually, means that by the time he leaves office this winter the US government will have a debt of around $9tn. In Bill Clinton’s day there was a budget surplus of 2% of GDP.
Though there was much discussion from the floor at the London meeting about the need to cut the losses and for the US to quit Iraq right away, Professor Stiglitz himself was surprisingly uncertain about what could or should happen next. He stressed how unmindful, ignorant even, the Bush administration was of the requirements of international law from the outset of their Iraq adventure. “They didn’t understand that under the UN’s principles they would be the de facto occupier, have to govern in the interest of the Iraqi people. They didn’t realise they couldn’t just take over a country in the 19th century (or even 18th century) manner and use it for their own ends.”
Now the law, of nations and the international community, is catching up with the conquerors of spring 2003. The UN security council resolution empowering the American and coalition presence as the de facto occupier runs out in December, and won’t be renewed. The Americans have been desperately trying to negotiate a security pact with the Baghdad government take the UNSCR’s place. Last night, after three months of talks, the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, definitively rejected the deal which was to be based on a status of force agreement. His government was unwilling to grant the US rights to 58 bases, some huge, in the country, judicial immunity to all US personnel, and the right to arrest, try and extradite any Iraqi citizen.
Al-Maliki has powerful backers in rejecting the deal – among them the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme guide and leader in Iran. Even more pertinent the leading Shia cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has also indicated he wants to the Americans given no permanent institutional presence in a future Iraq.
The British would be in an even more acute dilemma should there be no agreement for the continuing presence of international forces beyond December. Any wrongdoing by a British soldier, and possibly even his or her very presence on Iraqi, could see them brought before the international criminal court, to which Britain subscribes but America does not.
Joe Stiglitz’s critique has been another timely reminder how context-free, and contemptuous of history regime George Bush and regime Tony Blair have been (just read Cherie Blair’s autobiographical ramblings about Iraq) in their Middle East escapade. However, history cannot be predictive. The Iraq crisis of today is different from where it was at the end of 2003, when things started to go really badly wrong. Now it is inextricably tied up with the increasingly complex crisis and confrontation with Iran – an aspect Stiglitz omitted to mention in his Front Line colloquium.
What he did flag up was that the Iraq mess is likely to go on for a lot longer than we may have imagined only a few months ago. Even an Obama presidency would be hard pushed to get the troops home in months rather than years, without risking further troubles and war across the Gulf. And Joseph Stiglitz is surely right in conjecturing it is going to cost the US, UK and the global economy a lot more than we may even imagine now.
Source: Robert Fox: The cost of war in Iraq keeps on rising | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
BuelahMan
Lynda
kelsosnuts
