Pay For That War With The Money You Have - Not The Money You Wish You Had
by pessimist
As King George used to love to exclaim, "It's YOUR Money!". This taxpayer, who has regularly paid more in taxes than many people earn in a year, isn't very happy with the management of my investment in the commonweal of my nation.
King George has taken my nation to war (we'll ignore for the moment the lack of veracity in his reasons for doing so), and frankly, I'm seriously disappointed in how little he has managed to accomplish - and at great expense to boot!
The last war that cost us so much money was Vietnam (we'll ignore for the moment the way that one turned out), and yet the Iraq Oil Rustle is proving to be almost as expensive. Yesterday, a day which should live in infamy, Rep. John Murtha revealed that the largesse for America's military-industrial complex is swinging into high gear - even though Owwer Commanduh-in-Flightsuit long ago revealed that the Iraq mission was 'accomplished'
Military Will Request $100B For Iraq Next Year, Murtha Reveals
The total [economic] cost of the Iraq war is quickly approaching the cost of Vietnam, which lasted 8 years.
During his response to President Bush, Murtha revealed, for the first time, that the Pentagon will ask for an additional $100 billion for operations in Iraq next year:
MURTHA: Twenty years it’s going to take to settle this thing. The American people is not going to put up with it; can’t afford it. We have spent $277 billion. That’s what’s been appropriated for this operation. We have $50 billion sitting on the table right now in our supplemental, or bridge fund we call it, in the Appropriations Committee.
Using Murtha's numbers, by the end of 2006 (assuming all of these funds are allocated - is there any chance that they won't?) the Iraq Oil Rustle will have cost me and all of my fellow American taxpayers $427 Billion - or an amount just shy of the entire amount spent on the Pentagon in FY 2004. "But should these numbers be trusted?" our wrong-wing friends might ask. One reporter did ask, and he got his answer:
QUESTION:You said that you expect the military to ask for $100 billion. Where are you getting that figure?MURTHA: Where I get all my figures: the military.
Murtha has reason to know. He’s the ranking member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.Crooks and Liars has the video.
Dealing directly with the military you have, and not the one THE Donald Rum$feld wishes he had, should mean that you are getting the correct information. Correct information is vital for investors in the American commonweal, and the following article (we'll ignore the fact that it was written by a historian and not the White House spin doctors for now) offers a prospectus on the performance of those mi$-$pending 'Your Money':
Infamous Comparisons: December 7, 1945 Vs. September 11, 2005
This article compares where America stood four years after Pearl Harbor -- and four years after the 9/11 sneak attack.
In less than four years after entering WWII, America and its allies defeated the greatest military threat ever assembled in world history – the fascist Axis powers of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. V-E Day was May 8, 1945, 210 days prior to the fourth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. August 15, 1945, was V-J Day, and on Sept. 2, 1945, Tokyo officially surrendered, respectively 115 and 97 days before December 7, 1945.
And it cost, as presented above, over $3 trillion in constant 2005 dollars.
But I digress.
But four years after 9/11, Bush remains unable to defeat a ragtag group of insurgents and terrorists, with no end in sight to the Iraqi insurgency and "War on Terrorism." Since the conquest of Iraq began March 19, 2003, there have been more than 2,110 dead U.S. military deaths, as well as - according to the December 3, 2005, broadcast of PBS’ The McLaughlin Group - 49,000-plus wounded.
Here's the exact quote:
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides, 2,125; U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, all now out of Iraq, 49,500; Iraqi civilians dead, 118,900.
The personal costs, in collateral human damage, of the Iraq Oil Rustle are significant, but such human expense means nothing to wrong-wingers when there is a profit for GOP campaign contributors to be made through the usage of irresponsible and indiscriminant warfare!
We taxpayers let them get away with it. There was no good reason to commence the Iraq Oil Rustle in the first place, as Turkish-American columnist Cenk Uygur posits:
It seems that the Bush administration is having trouble defining victory in Iraq. There’s a good reason for that. That’s because the war was pointless in the first place.Remember, the top two reasons given for war was that Iraq had WMD and links to al-Qaeda. Neither of these things was true, so we won the war before we even started.
What this administration doesn’t tell you (and the Democrats do a woeful job of explaining this as well) is that the reason people are arguing we should stay now is to clean up the problems we created by attacking in the first place. The current problems in Iraq did not exist before our invasion. There was no sectarian strife spilling into the streets, there were no Sunni-Shiite battles, there was no Sunni insurgency, there were no Shiite death squads. [T]hose problems are the ones we are fighting now.
By going into Iraq we created the problems we are now trying to fix by staying in Iraq. It’s important to remember that the reason we’re staying has absolutely nothing to do with the reason we went in.
[W]e have the President blathering on about the good guys versus the bad guys, and how we are fighting against people who hate freedom. Has there ever been a President whose rhetoric is more irrelevant? Bush certainly knows how to create problems, but it looks like he has absolutely no idea how to solve them.
For a long time, I was concerned about the foreign jihadists that had come into Iraq after the war began. I did not want the US to leave while those people could still establish a base and gain power in the area. I am now convinced the local Sunnis will wipe them out as soon as they no longer have a reason to work together, i.e. as soon as we leave.
The foreign terrorists have already picked a fight with the Iraqi Sunni insurgency by glomming on to their racketeering business in the Anbar province. This is no joke, racketeering and protection money from local businesses is one of the primary ways both sides raise money and they have now broken out in open gun battles on the streets because of this conflict.
But even assuming that Uygur is correct about the Sunnis dealing with the foreign jihadis, will that end the problems and produce the so-called Iraqi democracy that King George touts so loudly (we'll ignore for the moment that it's fallacious to think it truly representative of Iraqis)? Uygur's answer: That depends!
In reality, democracy requires a balance of power. The United States creates an artificial balance of power by having an overwhelming force on the ground. And the power void we will eventually leave behind, no matter when we leave, will cause an upheaval in that balance of power and inevitably throw Iraq out of equilibrium and into violent conflict.
The Shiite-Sunni-Kurdish problems will exist no matter what from here on out and we have to figure out how to best deal with them. Victory is when the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds have achieved some meaningful balance of power without our presence.
[I]f they achieve a balance now with our heavy presence on the ground, that is a false balance of power that will change as soon as we leave and stop tipping the scales to one side. That is useless. So, we must find a way to exit while we maintain a workable balance of power between all the parties.The overwhelming majority of the insurgency is Sunni, as even the President admitted in his last speech. The Sunnis are not any more intrinsically evil than the Shiites.
[W]ill the Shiite majority give Sunnis rights and share the oil revenue? That is the only thing that can appease the Sunnis, and thereby get them to slow their insurgency. Right now, that is not what the Shiite power holders appear to be planning. They appear to be setting up a regime that will take as much of the power and oil revenue as they possibly can.
There is another faction that is causing troubles for King George's ambitions - and costing more of 'Your Money':
The delicate balance of oil rich Kirkuk in northern Iraq, with all of its different warring ethnicities, is another enormous problem. There are a slew of incentives and disincentives we could give the Kurds to get them to ease up on the Arab Sunnis in the area (let alone the Turkmen – don’t ask).But pretending there’s a democracy that has nothing to do with all the oil in Kirkuk is preposterous. The Kurds are moving the Arabs out of town forcibly so that they could have more Kurdish votes in town to accommodate that “democracy.” They are structuring the democracy around the oil rather than vice versa.
I’m hoping there are a couple of people in government who are smarter and can get a grasp of what’s happening in Iraq. It’s time to get beyond the original war we thought we were fighting in Iraq and get on to the one we are actually fighting.
As an investor in the American commonweal, this taxpayer would dearly love to see qualified and responsible managers take over the handling of the nation. As I don't yet see any coming from either side of the political spectrum, I can only hope that those who hold a much bigger investment in the American commonweal - specifically Japan and China, among several other nations - see fit to remain invested. To pull out now just might ruin the holiday shopping season!
But rest assured, the bears are not in hibernation, and when the bull has run its course, they get to savaging that which remains. As the Iraq Oil Rustle continues to squander funds needed to pay for things like real Katrina reconstruction, real national defense, and real investment in job-producing alternative energy production, protection from the bears decreases daily. Once the value is all gone, the bears get to scavenging.
Still glad you Red Staters voted for 'values'? Don't you wish you still had the chance of realizing some? Maybe it's time to cut your losses and hope for a future opportunity to improve your holdings in the American Commonweal Fund.
You aren't now getting full value from Bu$hCo.
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