Cost Of The Iraq War – Was It Worth It?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Chew on that for just a moment, $60 billion spent on reconstructing what we paid our military to blow up.  Detroit, Michigan is in a state of disrepair but we’ve got $60 billion lying around or that we can borrow from the Chinese so we can rebuild what our military was paid to destroy.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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The U.S.-led war in Iraq claimed 190,000 lives [Mike: So much for the pro-life crowd.] and will cost the U.S. government at least $2.2 trillion, according to the findings of a project at Brown University released Thursday.

The Costs of War report, released ahead of the 10^th anniversary of the war on March 20, said that the financial calculation included “substantial” costs to care for wounded U.S. veterans. [Mike: This is a debt that we must repay, ladies and gentlemen.]

The total estimate far outstrips the initial projection by President George W. Bush’s government that the war would cost $50 billion to $60 billion. [Mike: They can’t even estimate how much wars cost correctly.]

More than 70 percent of those who died of direct war violence in Iraq were civilians, or an estimated 134,000 people. [Mike: But that was just collateral damage. They had it coming to them. That’s their dose of American exceptionalism. Nice work.] A small number of the 190,000 dead were U.S. casualties: 4,488. U.S. military members and at least 3,400 U.S. contractors, according to the report.

“The staggering number of deaths in Iraq is hard to fathom, but each of these individuals has to count and be counted,” said Catherine Lutz, a professor at Rhode Island-based Brown University who helped lead the study.

The U.S. government has spent $60 billion on reconstruction…

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Mike:  Chew on that for just a moment, $60 billion spent on reconstructing what we paid our military to blow up.  Detroit, Michigan is in a state of disrepair but we’ve got $60 billion lying around or that we can borrow from the Chinese so we can rebuild what our military was paid to destroy.  This is a Windows project in a foreign land, is it not?  Gee, I wonder who it would be who would be doing the rebuilding.  Gee, I just wonder.  Do you think there’s any American contractors that do that?  Do you think anyone in the United States has been sending contractors over into Iraq to help with the rebuilding process?  Gee, I wonder where that idea came from.

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The U.S. State Department conceded that both countries made “enormous sacrifices.” Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, responding to the Costs of War report, said that the United States and Iraq have forged a “strategically important bilateral relationship.”

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Mike:  190,000 dead and $2.2 trillion and we’re looking for things to justify this heinous excessive use of power.  Instead of just saying: We made a horrendous mistake here; too much life and too much treasure was expended in this and we must do all that we can to prevent this in the future, no, we try to paper over it and make it so that it’s just a footnote in history.  If it comes up again and we have to do it, if there’s another Bush and Cheney and they say it’s a preemptive war and we have to do this, perhaps then maybe we’ll have some reconsideration of this.  The fact that we can even continue on without acknowledging this and offering some manner of contrition is disturbing.  I know what some of you are thinking.  [mocking] “You want our soldiers to be tried for war crimes?”  No, they were following orders.  It is the politicians that sent them over there to do this.  It is the Congress and the men that organized this in the executive branch and the ones that promoted it that ought to be doing the apologizing.  Sad, sad epoch in history, folks.

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“Compared to where we were in the Saddam era, we now have a bilateral security agreement. We have deep economic interests and ties…”

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Mike:  So we have to go and invade a country and blow it to smithereens to have free trade with them? What a wonderful precedent.  You know all those countries in South America that are knitting our shirts and t-shirts?  Instead of letting them have all the business, why don’t we just invade them?  Just imagine the economic interest we could have there.  Good grief!

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The Costs of War project involved 30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations and other organizations.

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Mike:  Of course, your average decepticon is going to say, [mocking] “The UN was involved in that study.  Of course it’s crooked.”  Let’s just say it’s 50 percent correct and only a mere 95,000 souls were lost in the war effort and only $1.1 trillion was expended.  Is that any less disastrous, even just from the human point of view?  This is just staggering.

End Mike Church Show Transcript