How Much It's Costing

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Impeach George Bush

How Much It's Costing

Source: TheTIP, 2003-09-23

Candidate: Big Government

Congress is now caught up in the President's request for another $87 billion for Iraq. The New York Times reports it's mostly for military operations -- "only" $15 billion or so goes to improving or restoring infrastructure via the cost-plus no-bid contracts of the suspiciously inefficient Halliburton crowd. This latest ante would bring the total for occupying Iraq and Afghanistan to about $166 billion (the vast majority of it in Iraq). Or 25 times what we had to kick in for the 1991 Gulf War. Back then, our allies picked up nearly all of the $84 billion tab (in today's dollars).
The on-going costs of our latest Iraqi adventure are measured in more than just lives and treasure. Knight Ridder Newspapers, citing US intelligence officers, reports that perhaps half of the intelligence and special forces assets in Afghanistan were diverted to the Iraq fronts. No wonder Osama bin Laden is still at large. But Osama missing is an old story -- just like the story of how we were tricked into Iraq in the first place with a bunch of falsehoods -- old story, old story, forget about it, move along, nothing to see here ...
* * *
There are any numbers of ways we could otherwise spend $87 billion. At home, the American Society of Civil Engineers says that "America's infrastructure is coming apart at the seams," with repairs and improvements needed everywhere from bridges to schools to drinking water systems. The society's report finds such infrastructure has stagnated or deteriorated over the past two years of Bush Republican rule. To take just one example, the society finds 75 percent of our schools are inadequate -- and concludes more than $127 billion will be needed over the next five years to repair existing classrooms and keep up with demand for new ones. Then again, perhaps it's best to pay for Halliburton to build schools in Iraq.
Or maybe you're uncomfortable with what could be seen as a blanket argument against most foreign aid. (I'm not; here's why.) So consider instead the logic of demanding $87 billion for Iraq, while only seeking $200 million -- 1/435th of that -- for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. As Jeffrey Sachs observes, our President wants "to pump tens of billions of dollars into a middle-income oil-rich country of 24 million people, while utterly neglecting 500 million impoverished Africans, 10 million of whom will actually die this year of extreme poverty, too poor to buys the drugs, bed nets, fertilizers, tube wells, and other basic contrivances that could keep them alive." Then again, President Bush has already gotten the praise and the photo op, so where's the incentive to follow through?
The Nation
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User Originated Comments:

From: observer
2004-04-27 02:19:25
so saddam didnt want anyone to know about his
secret (sic)weapons of m-ss destruction. so how
come every rednecked idiot in u.s. who barely
leaves the couch, seem to know all about them? not
a very good secret.

although he did seem
to manage to keep it a secret from everybody who
actually lives there, how odd.

hard to
believe (for any sane person), that saddam went
through all this cr-p just to make people mad at
gwchimp. seems a bit lame.

From: JKM
2004-03-10 10:00:09
i worked in iraq for 6 months.

american
tax payers are paying 4 to 5 times the value to
subcontractors of the primes like bechtel and the
prime contractors and the general contractors are
making the money.....the iraqis people are making
very little money.

we have hired
halliburton to provide services to troops who are
bored with nothing do and are having to exercise
to keep from getting fat.......there are tens of
thousands of troops in fortified areas like the
baghadad airport sitting on their -sses getting
paid with our taxe money while haliburton is being
paid with tax money to do work that the troops
should be doing.

From: stranger
2004-02-27 00:00:00
...oh thats right, he'd killed everyone else who
knew the location (because we all know how much
iraqis are into killing), and since he was hiding
in a hole in the ground, he couldn't run around
the country with his spade and dig them all out in
time, because he had no warning that the americans
were coming (only about 13 years).

From: pat
2004-02-26 00:00:00
he couldn't use them if he was hiding

From: Robbie
2004-02-26 00:00:00
again, the inability to analyze rears it's head
from the right.

the question isn't why he
said he didn't have them.

the question is
why didn't he use them when he knew his time was
up.

if cornered, even a rat will bare its
teeth. this rat had no teeth.

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Whatever the cost, the rebuilding of Iraq has to be our first priority.
Whatever the cost, the money spent on Iraq would be better spent at home in the United States.

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