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Blunderov
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The End of OIL
« on: 2011-12-16 03:05:24 » |
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[Blunderov] I suppose it is meet to mark the official end of the fiasco in Iraq and count the cost. How much is an empire worth? Every purchase has it's price as a wise man once remarked. The full cost of this one is yet to be completely gathered in and perhaps it never really will be. What did America get in return for so much blood and treasure? Not a lot. Saddam Hussein was hanged and Osama Bin Laden was allegedly killed in an alleged military operation. Apart from those rather negligible achievements, everything else is much, much worse than it was before the USA and the UK carried out their criminal attacks against Afghanistan and Iraq and the world is now a much more dangerous place than it was.
The world economy lies in smouldering ruins. The climate is a runaway train. Any pretensions towards a Western "civilization" of reason and justice have been obliterated by serial atrocities. Abu Ghraib. Fallujah. Gaza. Waterboarding. Guantanemo Bay. These were just some of the bonfires of the Enlightenment of the West. Perhaps future historians will mark this new still point at the turning of world as the beginning of the new Dark Ages? It's quite possible.
globalresearch
Iraq War "ends" with a $4 trillion IOU
Veterans’ health care costs to rise sharply over the next 40 years*
by Christopher Hinton
Global Research, December 15, 2011
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion.
Over a 50-year period, that comes to $80 billion annually.
Ceremony marks end of Iraq war
The flag is lowered Thursday in Baghdad at a ceremony to mark the closure of U.S. military headquarters and the end of the war in Iraq.
Although that only represents about 1% of nation’s gross domestic product, it’s more than half of the national budget deficit. It’s also roughly equal to what the U.S. spends on the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency combined each year.
Near the start of the war, the U.S. Defense Department estimated it would cost $50 billion to $80 billion. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was dismissed in 2002 after suggesting the price of invading and occupying Iraq could reach $200 billion.
“The direct costs for the war were about $800 billion, but the indirect costs, the costs you can’t easily see, that payoff will outlast you and me,” said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at American Progress, a Washington, D.C. think tank, and a former assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan.
Those costs include interest payments on the billions borrowed to fund the war; the cost of maintaining military bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain to defend Iraq or reoccupy the country if the Baghdad government unravels; and the expense of using private security contractors to protect U.S. property in the country and to train Iraqi forces.
Caring for veterans, more than 2 million of them, could alone reach $1 trillion, according to Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, in Congressional testimony in July.
Other experts said that was too conservative and anticipate twice that amount. The advance in medical technology has helped more soldiers survive battlefield injuries, but followup care can often last a lifetime and be costly.
More than 32,000 soldiers were wounded in Iraq, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Add in Afghanistan and that number jumps to 47,000.
Altogether, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost the U.S. between $4 trillion and $6 trillion, more than half of which would be due to the fighting in Iraq, said Neta Crawford, a political science professor at Brown University.
Her numbers, which are backed by similar studies at Columbia and Harvard universities, estimate the U.S. has already spent $2 trillion on the wars after including debt interest and the higher cost of veterans’ disabilities.
The annual budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs has more than doubled since 2003 to a requested $132.2 billion for fiscal 2012. That amount is expected to rise sharply over the next four decades as lingering health problems for veterans become more serious as they grow older.
Costs for Vietnam veterans did not peak until 30 or 40 years after the end of the war, according to Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“We will have a vast overhang in domestic costs for caring for the wounded and covering retirement expenditure of the war fighters,” said Loren Thompson, a policy expert with the Lexington Institute. “The U.S. will continue to incur major costs for decades to come.”
*[Bl.] Of course the veterans will land up getting stiffed as will 99% of us.
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Blunderov
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Re:The End of OIL
« Reply #1 on: 2011-12-17 10:33:24 » |
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[Blunderov] More Op Ed on Iraq and the aftermath. It would be quite ironic if Maliki turned into another Saddam which he quite easily might but with this difference: he is not anti-Iranian! So the US exits Iraq in a worse position than when it went in. This is called "losing".
opednews
Is the Iraq War actually over?
By Danny Schechter
Launched with so much bluster and zeal as a campaign -- no, make that a crusade to save the world from invented WMDs -- the Iraq War, we are told, is winding down. US soldiers are being shown the door amid claims that the only winner is Iraq itself.
In a formal photo printed in the New York Times, President Obama, with hand over heart, poses with Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at the Arlington National Ceremony and boasts of a "successful outcome.''
"What we have now," he says, "is an Iraq that is self-governing, that is inclusive, and that has enormous potential."
Wreaths were laid at a cemetery as the remaining US troops that rolled across the desert with so much ardour back in 2003 are now ready themselves to roll out.
Unmentioned in the article were the futile negotiations and pressure by a US government desperate to stay in the country by any means possible. When domestic sentiment in Iraq made that impossible, the US began the process of turning its junior partner into a new customer with more sales of military hardware that include at least 18 more F-16 fighters. With oil pumping again in Iraq, it will now have to pay back these pricey procurements, and Washington will become a beneficiary with an outgoing revenue stream now "incoming."
Maliki has also been playing his own game, trying to show he is not an American client by refusing to join calls to topple Syria's Bashar al-Assad and rejecting a trade embargo favored by the West. This assertion of independence is not appreciated by those who feel he "owes us" and should ask "how high" when we say "jump," although President Obama says he "respects" Maliki's decision.
At the same time, Maliki has dipped into Saddam's playbook by deploying his own secret police and military to round up hundreds of former Baathist supporters (bear in mind that Iraqis in that era had no other choices). A US think-tank documenting his crackdown is saying that Maliki is primarily concerned with his own survival. "Maliki is a Maliki-ist," says one expert. You could find similar quotes just a few years ago about Saddam being a "Saddam-ist."
Power does that. Hussein, who began his dictatorial rule with US support, was known for dispensing with his opponents too. Maliki, however, does so in the name of a "fragile democracy." Like Saddam, he too uses his son, Ahmad, to evict US firms from the Green Zone in Baghdad and do his father's forceful bidding. And human rights groups are criticising him for running secret jails, imprisoning journalists and critics, and firing 100 professors from a university in Saddam's old hometown of Tikrit.
Apparently, the US has expressed "concerns" about this behavior. But those concerns don't seem to get in the way of commercial deals and political support. Rule by fiat seems fine when carried out by our friends.
Iraq fatigue
Here in the US, it is as if Iraq "fatigue" has set in. There's little reporting now about a war that most Americans seem to agree was a mistake and that was once featured on every channel around the clock.
This savage war has long been deemed an embarrassment, except by the contractors who have made fortunes and the soldiers who are still being thanked for their "service" as they head home facing certain unemployment. Because of their frequent tours, many are nursing serious wounds, coping with mental problems and dealing with broken families. They are also victims of the conflict, but not to the same extent as more than a million Iraqis who seem to have been forgotten and ignored.
It may take a while for officials to admit that the US lost the war it never should have started, but that will come too.
We have effectively "liberated" oil fields for other countries to claim while politicians trained in Iran have taken many positions of power. Tehran must be happy that the US deposed Saddam Hussein, whose US-backed war against Iran cost them at least half a million lives.
And the gigantic protest movement spawned by the war, while focussed now on Afghanistan, is still active. The Stop the War coalition in London is backing a protest at the US embassy supporting "Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation." They have called for "a picket outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square to mark the occupation forces' scheduled withdrawal from Iraq at the end of this month. Demonstrators will be demanding the expulsion of all American mercenaries, military advisers and trainers and reduction of the size of the American embassy in Baghdad."
The opposition in Iraq sees the US role and the politicians they put in power through elections as occupiers of questionable integrity. That suggests we have not heard the last of a resistance movement in Iraq, which means that violence and instability is still a threat. It may, however, be hard for the US and American media outlets to predictably blame all criticism on al-Qaeda terrorists in the future.
With Maliki now terrorising his own enemies, often in the name of questionable "plots" to overthrow him, Iraq will remain volatile. Bear in mind that after all these years, the Iraqis are still suffering from a broken electricity system as well as serious food and medical shortages.
The county has a long way to go to recover from a war that is not over. The US, meanwhile is going, at least publicly. The neo-cons who backed the war now see Iraq as a "surrogate" that will remain dependent -- or at least, so they hope. To paraphrase a cliché: The war that began with the bang of shock and awe ended with the whimper of withdrawal with few of the issues solved. Many Americans are saying "good," while most Iraqis are saying good riddance.
Cross-posted from Al Jazeera
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Re:The End of OIL
« Reply #2 on: 2011-12-18 02:51:36 » |
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[Blunderov] The financial costs are one thing and the human toll entirely another. Most of the supine MSM reports in the region of 100,000 Iraqi casualties but the true count is far, far more grim than that and will probably never be officially admitted. It does not end there. The future cancer casualties due to the use of depleted uranium will continue for generations to come.
http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article21493
US withdraws but Australian ABC censors out 4.6 million war-related Iraqi dea
by: Dr Gideon Polya
Friday December 16, 2011 - 02:42
The Americans have almost completed their withdrawal from war-devastated Iraq that since 1990 has suffered 4.6 million war-related deaths, 1.7 million violent deaths, 2.9 million avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation, 5-6 million refugees and 2.0 million under-5 infant deaths, 90% avoidable and due to egregious US Alliance war crimes in gross violation of the Geneva Convention.
However the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-beholden Mainstream media of the Western Murdochracies and Lobbyocracies have resolutely refused to report the carnage of the 2 decade US War on Muslims in an ongoing process of utterly repugnant genocide complicity, genocide ignoring, genocide denial, holocaust complicity, holocaust ignoring, and holocaust denial.
Thus Australian ABC News of the taxpayer-funded ABC (Australia’s equivalent of the UK BBC) : “The US military has officially ended its war in Iraq, packing up a military flag at a low-key ceremony nearly nine years after the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein. There are a little more than 4,000 US soldiers in Iraq but they will depart in the coming days, at which point almost no more American troops will remain in a country where there were once nearly 170,000 personnel on more than 500 bases. The withdrawal ends a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers dead, many more wounded and 1.75 million Iraqis displaced, after the 2003 US-led invasion unleashed brutal sectarian fighting” (see “US military marks end of its Iraq war”, ABC News, 16 December 2011: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-... ). Another ABC News report talks of “100,000 plus” Iraqi dead.
“Tens of thousands” or “100,000 plus” dead Iraqis enormously underestimates the death toll. Thus the eminent US Just Foreign Policy organization estimates on the basis of expert medical epidemiological data that post-invasion Iraqi violent deaths total 1.5 million and comments “The number is shocking and sobering. It is at least 10 times greater than most estimates cited in the US media, yet it is based on a scientific study of violent Iraqi deaths caused by the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003” (see: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/no... ). In addition some 0.2 million Iraqis were killed in the Gulf War.
However violent deaths represent one part of the post-invasion death toll. Non-violent avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation as estimated from UN Population Division data (2006 revision data i.e. before the US Puppet Maliki Government was installed) total 1.2 million (2003-2011, under US Occupation) and 1.7 million (1990-2003, under Sanctions and US, UK and Israeli bombing).
UN Population Division data (2006 Revision data) show that Iraqi under-5 infant deaths totaled 0.8 million (2003-2011) and 1.2 million (1990-2003). In 1999 Carol Bellamy, former Executive Director of UNICEF noted that if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998 and that “Today’s under-5 mortality rate of 131 per 1000 in south and central Iraq is comparable to current rates in Haiti (132) and Pakistan (136)”(see: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqi... ).
After US Puppet Maliki was installed UN statistics were revised to claim that under Sanctions, US, UK and Israeli bombing (1990-2003) and thence of violent Occupation (2003-2011) actually led to an asserted DECREASE in under-5 infant mortality (deaths under-5 per 1,000 births) from 47 (1995-2000) to 44 (2000-2005), 42 (2005-2010) and 41 (2010-2015) (see: http://esa.un.org/wpp/unpp/p2k0data.asp ).
In 2007, the United Nations estimated that nearly 5 million refugees fled the country since 2003, this figure not including internally displaced persons (IDPs). Iraqi refugees generated by the war total 5-6 million (see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refuge... and UNHCR: http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e48642... ).
Dennis Halliday was the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq from September 1, 1997, until 1998. He resigned after 34 years with the UN, including being UN assistant secretary-general, over the Sanctions imposed on Iraq, characterizing them as “genocide”(see: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqi... ).
Nearly 22 years of Western war against the Iraqi people is now associated with 1.7 million violent deaths, 2.9 million avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation, 5-6 million refugees and 2.0 million under-5 infant deaths (90% avoidable and due to gross US Alliance violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War which demand that an Occupier must provide life-sustaining food and medical requisites to its conquered subjects “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”: http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instre... ) .
This constitutes an Iraqi Holocaust and an Iraqi Genocide according to by Article 2 of the UN Geneva Convention: (see: http://www.edwebproject.org/sidesho... ) which states: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Australia’s ABC has resolutely failed to report the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide. Indeed ABC Searches of the entire ABC site for the key terms “Iraqi Holocaust”, “Iraqi Genocide” and even “under-5 infant deaths” or “under-5 deaths” yield ZERO (0) results. An ABC Search for “avoidable deaths” yields ZERO results in relation to Iraq and merely 13 for other (e.g. domestic medical) contexts.
An ABC Search for the term “Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” yields ZERO (0) results of reportage by the ABC but turned up the following comment made by a person with the nom de plume “Think not” who has been evidently inspired by the identical argument I have been endlessly presenting over the last decade: “In his recent speech in Cairo, Obama actually made a confession of war criminality when he alluded to "aid" of $7.5 billion for Pakistan and $2.8 billion for occupied Afghanistan - yet Articles 55 and 56 of The Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons In Time of War demand that the Occupier does everything "to the fullest extent of the means available to it" to keep its conquered subjects alive. That means for 27 million occupied Afghans at least the same annual per capita medical expenditure as for metropolitan U.S.A. i.e. $6.714 per person per year x 27 million Afghans = $180 billion every year rather than the paltry $2.8 billion offered. Obama is currently the worlds number one violent extremist - the worlds number one killer of children, and the worlds number one holocaust denier because he absolutely ignores the horrendous human cost of the US’s invasions, occupations and devastation in the Muslim world” (see: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/s... ).
The annual total per capita medical expenditure permitted by the Americans in Iraq was US$167 in 2009 as compared to US$7,410 for the US (see http://www.who.int/countries/irq/en/.
In 2004 Australia’s top science journalist Robyn Williams permitted me to make a nation-wide broadcast on his Ockham’s Razor program entitled “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” (28 August 2005) : http://www.abc.net.au/radionational... .
In that broadcast I said in part (August 2005) : “The latest UNICEF report in 2005 estimates that for the year 2003 the under-5 infant mortality was 110,000 in occupied Iraq, 292,000 in occupied Afghanistan and 1,000 in the invading and occupying country Australia (noting that these countries have populations of about 25-million, 24-million and 20-million respectively).Using publicly available United Nations and medical literature data one can readily calculate that there have been about 0.4 million avoidable deaths in post-invasion Iraq. In 1991 the UK recommenced military action against Iraq that had kicked off in 1914. In 2003 the US, UK and Australia illegally invaded and conquered Iraq. I have calculated that the under-5 infant mortality was 1.2 million for Iraq since 1991; 0.2 million for Iraq since the 2003 invasion; and 0.9 million for Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion… The US, UK and Australia are clearly complicit in horrendous avoidable mortality and infant mortality in a swathe of invaded Asian countries in the post-1950 era. This now raises the philosophic issue of responsibility. The occupying ruler is responsible for the ruled, (noting ’occupation’ includes military, economic and political hegemony and rule by client indigenous regimes). Further, whether an adult or child is killed violently or dies non-violently from deprivation or avoidable disease, the end result is the same and the culpability the same. In 2004 the estimated per capita medical expenditure was only $US37 in occupied Iraq, but $US3,100 in the invading and occupying country, Australia. This roughly one-hundredfold difference in per capita medical expenditure is reflected in a one-hundredfold difference in under-5 infant mortality. The provision of grossly inappropriate medical assistance in occupied Iraq at only about 1% of the per capita level in the occupying Coalition countries is criminal and genocidal… Jihadist violence has taken roughly about 5,000 Western civilian lives over the last 20 years, with most of the victims dying on 9/11 (about 3,000) and the remainder including murdered Israeli civilians and the victims of atrocities such as Madrid, Lockerbie and Bali. However this jihadist violence has had immensely bloodier consequences through the hysterically and dishonestly promoted War on Terror that has been associated with post-invasion avoidable deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan alone that total 1.6 million.”
This talk was later published as a chapter entitled “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in a book “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/oc... ).
As of several weeks ago, an ABC Search for the title of my talk “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” yields ZERO (0) results and indeed a search for “gideon polya” yields only 2 results (3 radio broadcast transcripts and numerous comment thread contributions have disappeared).
However the courageous and ethical Ockham’s Razor site on ABC Radio National still carries links to these 3 significant radio broadcasts, namely the link http://www.abc.net.au/radionational... , that in turn gives links to "Bengali Famine": http://www.abc.net.au/radionational... , “Crisis in our universities": http://www.abc.net.au/radionational... , and “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality”: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational... . However in order to find these transcripts you need to know my name, the subject matter, and that they were to do with “history” and broadcast on the Ockham’s Razor Radio National program.
The ABC censorship of the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide also extends to censorship of the Palestinian Genocide (1.5 million war- and occupation-related Palestinian deaths, 0.1 million Palestinians killed violently, 1.4 million avoidable Palestinian deaths from war-, expulsion- and occupation-imposed deprivation, 7 million refugees, 3,600 Palestinian infants passively murdered by Apartheid Israel each year ), the Afghan Holocaust and Afghan Genocide (5.6 million war-related deaths, 4.2 million avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation, 3-4 million refugees and 2.9 million post-invasion under-5 infant deaths, 90% avoidable and due to US Alliance and Australian war crimes in gross violation of the Geneva Convention), the Somali Holocaust and Somali Genocide ( 2.2 million war-related deaths, 0.4 million violent deaths, 1.8 million avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation, 1.3 million under-5 infant deaths, 2.0 million refugees) and the Libyan Genocide (50,000 killed, 1 million Black Libyan refugees, 0.2 million other refugees) (see “Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/pales... , “Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/afgha... and “Muslim Holocaust, Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/musli... ).
ABC Searches of "the entire ABC site" for the terms "Palestinian Genocide", "Afghan Genocide", "Somali Holocaust", "Somali Genocide" and "Libyan Genocide" all yield ZERO (0) results.
In summary, the taxpayer-funded ABC (Australia’s equivalent of the UK BBC) has deliberately ignored and censored out authoritative reportage of the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide that has been associated with 4.6 million war-related Iraqi deaths, 1.7 million violent Iraqi deaths, 2.9 million avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation, 2.0 million under-5 infant deaths (90% avoidable and due to gross US Alliance war crimes in violation of the Geneva Convention) and 5-6 million refugees.
The ABC claims that it “Is Australia’s most trusted, independent source of news. Our network of more than 500 journalists at home and abroad provide unrivalled coverage of the news events that affect Australians” .William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) was hanged by the British in 1946 for broadcasting on behalf of the Nazi Germans. The Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-beholden and pro-war-, pro-Zionist- and pro-US ABC and its 500 “journalists” must simply be publicly exposed for lying by commission and lying by omission over the Iraqi Genocide (4.6 million war related deaths), Afghan Genocide (5.6 million war-related deaths), Palestinian Genocide (1.5 million war-, occupation- and expulsion-related deaths), Somali Genocide (2.2 million war-related deaths) and the Libyan Genocide (50,000 war-related deaths).
Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence complicity. Decent people are obliged to tell the Awful Truth to everyone they can but the Australian ABC through censorship, self-censorship and lying by commission and commission is complicit in the horrendous, genocidal war crimes of the US Alliance War on Muslims that has been associated with 9 million war-related deaths since 2001 and 12 million war-related deaths since 1990.
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