By Staff
The new euphemism dujour is "surge," as in sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq. The soldiers and Marines there already suffer from an ill-defined mission except not to come home until they "get the job done."
After November's midterm elections, President George W. Bush seemed to get the American people's yearning for a fresh "way forward" in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was gone the next day.
Supposedly the Decider in chief was open to the advice of the Iraq Study Group, but through Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush ruled out direct talks with Iran and Syria to enlist their cooperation in reducing civil war.
Bush also made it clear there will be no firm timetable for a U.S. pullout.
But more troops in a war that MSNBC says is costing us $10 million an hour? That smacks of compounding botched strategic moves.
We chose "Shock and Awe" over adequate boots on the ground, disbanded the Iraqi army, watched while infrastructure was looted, let dozens of sectarian militias fill the post-Saddam power void and gave nary a thought to reconstruction because our invading occupying force was expected to be greeted as liberators.
If the Pentagon could scrape up more troops, with whom would they ally themselves? What difference will a troop surge make in a war we no longer control? Or is it merely a face-saving projection of American resolve – or worse, a business consideration?
Has everyone conveniently forgotten that when America invaded Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration talked of a war that paid for itself with oil revenue? Instead of being laughed out of Washington for that stunning prediction, President Bush made Paul Wolfowitz World Bank president.
Congress has spent more than $350 billion on the conflict, including $50 billion appropriated already for 2007.
Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, winner of a Nobel Prize for economics, estimates the true cost of the war at $2.267 trillion, accounting for health care and disability benefits for the injured.
"The administration is trying to sell the notion that they have repealed the laws of economics," Stiglitz says. "They want us to believe we don't have to choose between guns and butter – that we can have them both. The reality is, the money spent on the war could have been spent on other things. One quarter of the war budget would have fixed Social Security for the next 75 years … With $2 trillion, we could have funded the entire world's commitment to foreign aid to poor countries for the next 20 years. Or just think what we could have done to stop global warming … We'll have a lower living standard than we otherwise would have achieved. The median American income is going down. Most of us are worse off than we were five or six years ago … (The administration) did do a calculation of the cost. They were just off. Like every other aspect of their analysis of this war, they were either deliberately misleading or incompetent."
During the Bush administration, Pentagon contracts have more than doubled to $270 billion.
There are almost 100,000 contractors on the ground in Iraq – a force almost equal to the 140,000 U.S. troops stationed there.
This shocking scale of for-profit occupation is unprecedented in the history of American military operations.
Contractors far outnumber coalition forces. Bush's leading ally in the War on Terror isn't England, with fewer than 15,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Halliburton subsidiary KBR (50,000). The only other countries with more than 1,000 troops are Australia and South Korea.
Halliburton ranked 28th among federal contractors before its CEO, Dick Cheney, became vice president. It's up to sixth.
Last year Halliburton made $6 billion from federal work – a 600-percent increase – of which $250 million was flagged by federal auditors as "unsupported" costs.
"Trust us" won't be enough to justify continuing this drain on America.