Nice war George, here's the bill

[crocodile deathroll]

Nice war George, here's the bill (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/03/opinion/03HEPB.html?ex=1063166400&en=4f41639fbe00d962&ei=5 062&partner=GOOGLE)

[The Don]

A few tens of billions here, a few tens of billions there, after a while that's going to turn into real money.

[The Don]

Mind you, the U.S. would have incurred a proprtion of that expense anyway, unless the figures quoted only relate to additional expenditure.

[a_unique_person]

From the source



So, how much is this experiment in nation-building going to cost the American taxpayer? First, let's consider what has already been spent. According to the Pentagon, the cost of preparation, aid to noncombatant allies



Aid to noncombatant allies? What the heck is that. Payoffs to the coalition of the billing sounds more like it.

[Crossbow]

I would say those figures are rather modest at best.

For example, they say that the cost of preparing and actually fighting the war was $45 billion, however it was my understanding that it cost about $90 billion to prepare for the war and another $20 billion to actually fight it.

Anyway, I expect those cost figures mentioned are just the direct military costs (which is pretty easy to work out) as opposed to total costs (which includes things like civilian overtime, money paid to private companies, the costs of the diplomatic offensive, the extra foreign aid to provided to grease the wheels of support provided by other countries, and that sort of thing).

In any case, it will be one seriously expensive trip!

P.S.: Does anyone else remember how candidate Bush hated 'Nation Building'?

[Samus]

It is difficult to really capture the cost of the war, especially since the most important statistics are not monetary, i.e. how many lives are we losing over this? How many reservists and guardsman are having their careers ruined because six-month deployments turn in to 12- or 18-month trips?

As you might recall, I supported Bush's invading Iraq under the premise that they are a threat to us, not by directly attacking us, but rather providing support to non-state actors that can attack us. What I do not support is nation-building (heh, Crossbow, funny that Bush didn't support it once, either), and I most certainly do not support hopping from country to country removing governments we don't like, which appears to be the Bush strategy.

[clk]

Dubya, Dubya, Dubya,
What have you done? Starting a false war across the world by lying to the American people and then sending them the bill? Where are your manners?

From the article: "This consists of $90 billion in conventional foreign debt (mostly for arms purchases from Russia, China, France and Germany)..."
Hmm, I wonder if Russia, France and Germany would be willing to forgive some of that debt considering how Dubya treated them with such respect before the war started.... :rolleyes:

edited to add: Dubya recently stated that the huge budget deficit was "nobody's fault". Wow! I'm betting that his press secretary can fool the country into believing that he is right. How can everyone say that Bush is going to be sooo hard to beat in '04? I mean all that Kerry has to do is go into a debate with Bush and say: "Hey Dubya, remember the war on Iraq and the billions of dollars it cost us? Didn't you say that Saddam was an imminent threat to the US? Hey, whatever happened to those WMDs? What happened to the coalition of the willing? What happened to the jobs that Clinton created? What happened to the surplus Clinton created? What happened to your friend Ken Lay? Why isn't he in jail?"
and then Kerry would win. :cool:

[crocodile deathroll]

The plan:
Take control of Iraq's oil fields which may potentially rival that in Saudi Arabia. OPEC will no longer call the shots and the US will bring down to price of oil bringing greater prosperity to the western world.

The reality:
It is costing the US taxpayers a billion dollars a week
Oil pipe lines are being frequently sabotaged and Iraq is on the brink of civil war with Jihadi fanatics pouring over the borders to engage on a new battlefront with the west.
Donald Rumsfeld is being forced to eat humble pie with his latest visit and is pleading for UN involvement, but still with a bit of a sting in the tail like the US still heading military command.

CDR

[Pyrrho]

If it doesn't cost a trillion dollars, it isn't worth doing at all.

[asthmatic camel]

Former Government minister Michael Meacher has claimed that the war on terrorism is a "political smokescreen" allowing the US to dominate the world and its oil supplies.

Mr Meacher, who was environment minister for six years until June, argued in a national newspaper that the US knew in advance of the September 11 attacks but did not act for strategic reasons.

It has since made "no serious attempt" to catch al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, he added.

His comments provoked a strong reaction from the US embassy in London. A spokesman said: "Mr Meacher's fantastic allegations - especially his assertion that the US government knowingly stood by while terrorists killed some 3,000 innocents in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia - would be monstrous, and monstrously offensive, if they came from someone serious or credible."

Mr Meacher, MP for Oldham, claimed that "the truth may well be a great deal murkier", citing a document called Rebuilding America's Defences, written in September 2000 by neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was set up by a group including Dick Cheney (George Bush's vice president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy defence secretary) and Lewis Libby (Mr Cheney's chief of staff).

The PNAC plan "is a blueprint for US world domination" which "provides a much better explanation of what happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis", he wrote.

"From this it seems that the so-called `war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."

He said the PNAC document stated that making the US "tomorrow's dominant force" would be a long process without "some catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbour".

Mr Meacher listed a number of newspaper articles detailing intelligence the US was said to be in possession of which warned of the September 11 attacks before they happened.

He also questioned why no fighter planes were scrambled until after the third plane had crashed into the Pentagon, asking: "Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11?"

Mr Meacher concluded that the "overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies".

By 2010, he said, Muslim countries will control as much as 60 per cent of the world's oil production and 95 per cent of its global export capacity.

Any comments ?

Regards,

AC.