The Cost of Iraq

[4gold]

If we had not gone to Iraq, here's what we could have done with that money:

*14 million people could have gotten a free ride at Harvard

*Tuition and fees for the University of Massachusetts-Boston could have been paid for over 53 million years

*We could have eliminated Medicare taxes for a year-and-a-half

*The Boston Red Sox could pay Dice-K 70,000 more years at his current pay

*World starvation could have ended, and every child in every country could have received a primary education for seven years

*We could duplicate the nation's largest public works project 40 times over

*Everyone in America could have gotten free gas for 530 days

*Every car in America could be coverted to ethanol-based nine-times over

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/galle ... war_costs/

How in the world can anyone say that Iraq was worth the costs?

[McCulloch]

And the US Dollar would still be worth more than the Canadian one.

[Easyrider]

If we had not gone to Iraq, here's what we could have done with that money:

*14 million people could have gotten a free ride at Harvard

*Tuition and fees for the University of Massachusetts-Boston could have been paid for over 53 million years

*We could have eliminated Medicare taxes for a year-and-a-half

*The Boston Red Sox could pay Dice-K 70,000 more years at his current pay

*World starvation could have ended, and every child in every country could have received a primary education for seven years

*We could duplicate the nation's largest public works project 40 times over

*Everyone in America could have gotten free gas for 530 days

*Every car in America could be coverted to ethanol-based nine-times over

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/galle ... war_costs/

How in the world can anyone say that Iraq was worth the costs?

I guess you'd have to be one of the liberated Iraqis who no longer suffer the rape and torture rooms of Saddam. Or one of the Kurds who no longer fear being gassed. Or one of the Kuwaitis who no longer fear another murdering Saddam invasion. Or anyone who cherishes freedom for themselves and their brethren over materialism, etc., etc.

[Rathpig]

I guess you'd have to be one of the liberated Iraqis who no longer suffer the rape and torture rooms of Saddam.

Because now the "rape and torture" could come from the hands of the United States, or the Sunni, or the Shi'a, or common criminals. Let's not forget who put Hussein in power and who allowed him to operate unchecked for over a decade.

Or one of the Kurds who no longer fear being gassed.

Hussein may not gas them with U.S. supplied weapons, but the U.S. will allow Turkey to attack them. The U.S. still refuses to discuss a Kurdish nation. I don't think the U.S. can claim much progress in this area. Anything the Kurds have done they have done for themselves.

Or one of the Kuwaitis who no longer fear another murdering Saddam invasion.

Which was initially ignored by the United States and really became an issue when the House of Saud feared their oil fields were next. One shouldn't ignore that the U.S. was aware of Hussein's military maneuvers prior to the 1991 invasion.

Or anyone who cherishes freedom for themselves and their brethren over materialism, etc., etc.

It is simply a lie that the illegal invasion of Iraq had any connection whatsoever to "freedom". No one has died for "freedom", and no one is fighting for "freedom". This is jingoistic propaganda. What is being fought for is higher oil prices, strategy control of the Persian Gulf, and to prevent Hussein from trading oil in Euros.

The troops in Iraq are corporate mercenaries, and the sad thing is they are not being paid even a fraction of what Blackwater pays their mercenaries.

The United States should be shamed by these events, and the citizens should have dragged Bush and Cheney from office many years ago. Every U.S. citizen has blood on their hands because the U.S. is a terrorist state just as surely as any other. How many civilians has the U.S. killed?

[Avariel]

I guess you'd have to be one of the liberated Iraqis who no longer suffer the rape and torture rooms of Saddam. Or one of the Kurds who no longer fear being gassed. Or one of the Kuwaitis who no longer fear another murdering Saddam invasion. Or anyone who cherishes freedom for themselves and their brethren over materialism, etc., etc.

Like Rathpig said, now they have US soldiers doing it as well as their own. I had to monitor an Iranian girl while I was in Fallujah for a year because two US Army scumbags raped her and beat her within an inch of her life. Yeah, our forces are some real knights in shining armor.

I had to sleep with my rifle and a full magazine waiting to be loaded under the pillow, and I was a female Marine; I still had buggers trying to sneak into my room at night and catch me unawares. Real proud of our boys, aren't you?

[Homicidal_Cherry53]

If we had not gone to Iraq, here's what we could have done with that money:

lol, Maybe we could have used it to cut into the federal deficit a little bit.

[cnorman18]

An interesting editoral from Investors Business Daily:

Winning Isn't News

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, July 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT Iraq:

What would happen if the U.S. won a war but the media didn't tell the American public?

Apparently, we have to rely on a British newspaper for the news that we've defeated the last remnants of al-Qaida in Iraq. London's Sunday Times called it "the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror." A terrorist force that once numbered more than 12,000, with strongholds in the west and central regions of Iraq, has over two years been reduced to a mere 1,200 fighters, backed against the wall in the northern city of Mosul.

The destruction of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) is one of the most unlikely and unforeseen events in the long history of American warfare. We can thank President Bush's surge strategy, in which he bucked both Republican and Democratic leaders in Washington by increasing our forces there instead of surrendering.

We can also thank the leadership of the new general he placed in charge there, David Petraeus, who may be the foremost expert in the world on counter-insurgency warfare. And we can thank those serving in our military in Iraq who engaged local Iraqi tribal leaders and convinced them America was their friend and AQI their enemy.

Al-Qaida's loss of the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis began in Anbar Province, which had been written off as a basket case, and spread out from there.

Now, in Operation Lion's Roar the Iraqi army and the U.S. 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment is destroying the fraction of terrorists who are left. More than 1,000 AQI operatives have already been apprehended.

Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, traveling with Iraqi forces in Mosul, found little AQI presence even in bullet-ridden residential areas that were once insurgency strongholds, and reported that the terrorists have lost control of its Mosul urban base, with what is left of the organization having fled south into the countryside.

Meanwhile, the State Department reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government has achieved "satisfactory" progress on 15 of the 18 political benchmarks " a big change for the better from a year ago.

Things are going so well that Maliki has even for the first time floated the idea of a timetable for withdrawal of American forces. He did so while visiting the United Arab Emirates, which over the weekend announced that it was forgiving almost $7 billion of debt owed by Baghdad " an impressive vote of confidence from a fellow Arab state in the future of a free Iraq.

But where are the headlines and the front-page stories about all this good news? As the Media Research Center pointed out last week, "the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 were silent Tuesday night about the benchmarks" that signaled political progress.

The war in Iraq has been turned around 180 degrees both militarily and politically because the president stuck to his guns. Yet apart from IBD, Fox News Channel and parts of the foreign press, the media don't seem to consider this historic event a big story.

Media bias? Naaah....

[Homicidal_Cherry53]

Well, it's about time we destroyed the organization we created by entering Iraq. AQI didn't even exist until 2005.

[cnorman18]

Well, it's about time we destroyed the organization we created by entering Iraq. AQI didn't even exist until 2005.

I'm not particularly inclined to argue with that; I was deeply ambivalent about this war before it began. I regarded (and still regard) a truly pre-emptive war as necessary and proper - but this was a preventive war, quite another and a much less defensible thing.

My point was rather more limited. This seems to me to be an important story, and is apparently so regarded abroad; why has it not been more widely reported here? Or, in the case of the major networks, newspapers and wire services, why has it not been reported at all?

Bad news from Iraq gets pretty prominent play in the media, does it not? I just feel compelled to wonder: By what journalistic standard is this story not worthy of even a paragraph on page 12?

[Catharsis]

Iraqis are now under military occupation, subject to curfews, and their basic freedoms and rights are suspended. Not sure how anyone can call this liberation? The new prime ministers and governors are puppets appointed by US, and Iraqi natural resources are now legally open for exploitation by foreign firms and corporations.

The reasons for the war are part of a broader economic and geopolitical agenda. Those who still believe the Americans went into Iraq to "liberate the oppressed people" choose to ignore basic facts and history. Liberation of the oppressed masses is a fine smokescreen.