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    $3 trillion and beyond ... and Gen Hugh Shelton Writes: Bush administration Lied?

    By oldenGoldenDecoy on Thu, 10/14/2010 - 11:28pm |
    Tell us something new General . . .

    From Thomas Ricks' Foreign Policy site...

    In his new memoirs, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton offers an interesting twist on why Iraq went so badly: He argues that Rumsfeld elbowed aside Gen. Richard Myers and the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also intimidated and flattered Gen. Tommy R. Franks while working directly with him, and so basically went to war without getting the advice of his top military advisers.

    The war plan that Rumsfeld and Franks went on to cook up, Shelton concludes, was "a fiasco." (479) (Hmm -- interesting choice of words.)

    It continues here

    Oh happy horse crap! It went wrong because Cheney. Rummy, and Bush decided to invade the goddamn country in the first place.

    Does anyone recall Jay Garner? Who, after the invasion in 2003 was appointed Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq and then was kicked down the road to make way for our very own Butcher in Baghdad Paul Bremer?

    One more thing: If you haven't seen the documentary No End in Sight ... do so. The trailer follows, but you can also watch the entire film at YouTube if you do a little research or get the DVD.


    By having a copy of the documentary it will allow a person to keep what happened in the proper perspective of the times and places of the actual events taken from the eye witness accounts and the direct memories of those who were directly involved.

    Let me make it clear. I'm not saying that General Shelton's latest book is a white-wash of the Iraq debacle.

    What I am saying is that the other losers and jackasses, the truest of the 'few bad apples' will be attempting to white-wash their responsibility by using others to publish their involvement as revisionist history forever.

    http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e66/LarrytheDuck/More_On_the_Morons/a9b61de7.jpg


    Oh... and speaking of forever ... and about that $3 trillion and beyond? From WaPo...

    By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
    Sunday, September 5, 2010

    Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

    But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

    Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?

    The answer to all four of these questions is probably... continues

    And where we are now? Talk about being left holding the bag...

    So ... Just keep all this in mind every time you hear some right-wing fool complain that the Democrats' "socialist" agenda will have to be paid for by our children, and our children's children for years to come...

    ~OGD~

    Comments

    One of the things that nag me at 3:00 a.m, other than did the bank lose my last deposit, is why the cabal didn't send in the reinforcements to get OBL when he was cornered at TORA BORA. Wow, that might have quenched Americans' apetites for revenge.


    by Oxy Mora on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 12:29am

    Perhaps they didn't want him caught or killed; it mightta ended some oil missions of the Cheney Energy Task Force plans prematurely. 


    by we are stardust on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 11:01am

    You mean you don't think the world is safer and better off without Saddam, with terrorists rampant in Iraq, and with Muqtada al-Sadr running his death squads and militias in Iraq from Iran where he has friends? 

    And it all has taken only $3,000,000,000,000 dollars and 5,000 dead Americans to do it? Bush did get Saddam's gun, that has to be worth something? Right?

    Muqtada al-SadrMullah Muqtada al-Sadr


    by NCD on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 12:29am

    Believe me when I say that the endless trillions for the Iraq war are nauseating to contemplate, OGD.  I once blogged about what else just one of the trillion might have paid for at the time.  The truth is, it wouldn't have been used to pay for infrastructure investment, education, alternative energy, verterans' mental health care, federal banks lending to actual small businesses, etc.  Congress pays attention to the budget for programs like those; but while they grumble for the cameras, they always apporve supplementals for War. 

    I haven't read the Stiglitz-Bilmes piece yet, though I will, but the 'broader impact' phrase got me thinking again of not just the economics, but all the blowback from that war, which is certainly not over, nor will it be.  I can't even find a site that says how many contract forces are there by now; all anyone talks about is the State Dept.'s private army of 7000.  There are likely many, many thousands more already.  They are already expanding the Embassy in Bagdad, that 3/4 of a billion dollar city. 

    Someone on the boards here had mentioned the desirability of leaving Afghanistan 'a little better', and I remembered reading a snapshot of Iraq today: how we left it.  And I wanted to write about it, but can't find the source again.  It spoke of the myriad toxic and radioactive dump sites, four hours of electricity, millions of cubic feet of concrete rubble, ubiquitous hunger, increasing civil war, and no government having been formed yet.  The global political 'broader impacts' would seem huge to me: the enemies created, as is happening in Af/Pak at an alarming rate. 

    And Obama just quietly announced a $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, ramping up the ME arms race even more.  To hear folks like Tony Cordesman, et.al., speak of the virtues of that is, again, nauseating.  We don't learn diddley from our mistakes, simply because we rarely acknowledge them until it's too late, and no one is paying attention.  See?  The Iraq war is over as far as the media are concerned.  But not for DoD, State, or the Iraqis.

    Anyway; rant's over for now.   ;o) 


    by we are stardust on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 11:34am

    The Iraq war is over as far as the media are concerned. But not for DoD, State, or the Iraqis.

    ..or the wives, husbands, parents, sisters, brothers, kids of the dead, from Iraq, America, Italy, UK, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain, Ukraine, Thailand, and on, and don't forget Sergio DeMello a highly skilled Brazilian UN executive and the dead from the first big bombing of the UN building, all the news persons killed, the Iraqi's who fled the country into poverty, the Iraqi Christians who were protected by Saddam but not by America or what pretends to be an Iraqi government. And then there are the wounded, in body and spirit, the suicides, and the US troops who murdered or killed whose lives became ruined due to this war, one they were not suited to fight in, and which, in the end, no one should ever have been sent to fight.


    by NCD on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 12:07am

     Ya' know . . .

     

    That price we are currently paying, and will continue to pay into the unforeseeable future is the same price we have paid over the past 60+ years (yes starting in '48), and are still paying to this very day due to our intervention in South East Asia that I experienced as a twenty year old in the mid 60s.

    My old professor Chalmers Johnson at UC San Diego back in the mid 60s, and I know you are most likely hip to his works, was a old "cold warrior" back then. But since then he has become a sharp critic of American imperialism that he has chronicled well about the enforcement of American hegemony over the world through the siting of hundreds of military bases throughout the world.

    And from Professor Johnson we get the Lessons of Blowback. But the problem is, who's learning?

    Unfortunately, the egos of many Americans are too easily manipulated when it comes to American Exceptionalism.

    Your points do not fall on deaf ears with me.

    Thanks for chiming in . . .

    ~OGD~


    by oldenGoldenDecoy on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 4:23am

    Yes, OGD; I read Johnson and Tom Englehardt and Nick Turse a lot, quote them plenty on my war blogs.  Turse has done lots of interviews with people who were harmed during our misadventures in Southesast Asia, and the stories are chilling. 

    Pepe Escovar has a new, very long piece out at the Asia Times that's about another New Silk Road concerning energy, not the potential mineral riches of Afghanistan.  I'll go get it later; it's very early here, and my brain hasn't been adequately coffeed yet. 

    I did a piece here recently about our myriad bases (far more than a thousand by now) as indicators of Perpetual War plans.

    http://dagblog.com/reader-blogs/war-everlasting-7102

    "But the problem is, who's learning?"  Yes.  Any more, when I hear that stupid quote about learning history or we are doomed to repeat our mistakes, I ask the same question.  We don't seem to learn anything from history, or if we do, at least our leaders and overlords learn all the wrong lessons from history.

     


    by we are stardust on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 7:03am

    Thank you for the list, NCD; I hadn't meant to be cavalier about the people.  I'm not in my heart.


    by we are stardust on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 7:06am

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