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$2 Trillion War Robbery

Comment by Larry Ross, December 23, 2006

$2 Trillion is the cost of the Iraq war, according to leading economist, Professor Charles Young of Columbia University .. This huge waste could be a low estimate, if Bush plans are activated, for a wider war in other Middle East countries.

Considering the war is both preplanned and based on lies, it is a robbery on a gigantic scale. Will Bush and his collaborators get away with this $trillion gigantic fraud, and the totally unjustified mass killing of 655,000 Iraqi people and 3,000 unwitting US Servicemen who believe they are doing their duty?

More and more Americans are saying no. Will they impeach Bush in time to stop him from committing even worse crimes, with death and damage on such a scale that humanity may never recover?  

Americans must act fast before Bush leads them past the point of no return - where determined resistance and commitment is too late to matter, and when ' the fate of the earth' has been decided by events. 

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The $2 Trillion Dollar War

A leading economist says the true cost of Iraq is far higher than President Bush claims
-- and America will pay the price for decades to come.

By Charles M. Young, Rolling Stone, December 20, 2006

When America invaded Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration predicted that the war would turn a profit, paying for itself with increased oil revenues. So far, though, Congress has spent more than $350 billion on the conflict, including the $50 billion appropriated for 2007.

But according to one of the world's leading economists, that is just a fraction of what Iraq will actually wind up costing American taxpayers. Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, estimates the true cost of the war at$2.267 trillion. That includes the government's past and future spending for the war itself ($725 billion), health care and disability benefits for veterans ($127 billion), and hidden increases in defense spending ($160 billion). It also includes losses the economy will suffer from injured vets ($355 billion) and higher oil prices ($450 billion).

Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University, is just the guy to size up the war's financial consequences. He served as chief economist at the World Bank and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton, and his book Globalization and Its Discontents has sold more than a million copies. Stiglitz sat down with Rolling Stone in New York to discuss the costs of Bush's misadventure in Iraq.

What's wrong with dropping a lot of money on the Iraq War? Didn't World War II pull America out of the Great Depression?
War is a lousy form of economic stimulus. The bang you get for the buck is very low. If we hadn't had to fight during the Depression, we would have become a much richer country by investing the money we spent on the war. Think of the Nepalese contractors doing work in Iraq. They spend their money in Iraq or Nepal -- not in America.

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