[lbo-talk] 1 Billion Dollars A Week: An That's On The Low Side - The Cost of Operation Screw Up Iraq

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 14 10:59:05 PDT 2003


[So uh, are any economists trying to factor this remarkable flight of capital down the bloody rabbit hole into their analyses of the American economic situation? Anyone?]

$1 Billion a Week

And that’s on the low side. So much for a ‘self-sustaining’ reconstruction. Parsing the real cost for U.S. taxpayers

By Christopher Dickey NEWSWEEK

July 21 issue — Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, came back from his recent trip to Iraq with some disturbing stories.

ONE AFTERNOON HE was headed out on the highway to the Baghdad airport in a heavily protected convoy. He’d already been warned that, on that road, “people get shot, there are fire fights.” Then the general with him suddenly ordered a machine gunner on top of a Humvee to get down. The reason: Iraqi killers are good at blindsiding American troops. “From time to time,” Lugar was told, “there are enemy, whoever they are, who sort of loop wires down from the bridges that might pluck somebody off at the neck as they go down the road.”

By the time Lugar’s trip to Iraq was over, the Indiana Republican worried the American people were being blindsided, too, by the true costs in blood and treasure of a war that has yet to end. “This idea that we will be in [Iraq] ‘just as long as we need to and not a day more’,” he said, paraphrasing the administration line, “is rubbish! We’re going to be there a long time.” Lugar said he kept demanding answers about the cost to American taxpayers and was not quite getting them. “Where does the money come from?” he asked. “How is it to be disbursed, and by whom?”

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full at http://www.msnbc.com/news/938233.asp#BODY

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