Joanna
Doug Henwood wrote:
> [When I was preparing to interview Phyllis Bennis on my radio show, I
> thought I'd check and see if Amy Goodman had done her. Sure enough,
> she had. I don't listen to DN!, so could someone who does tell me: Is
> this typical of Amy's interviewing style? Ask one broad question that
> shows no knowledge of the interviewee's product and let the
> interviewee just go on for a few minutes? For this she needs a staff
> of 10-15 and a budget approaching the seven figures?]
>
>
> <http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/24/1422258&mode=thread&tid=25>
>
>
> AMY GOODMAN: The Institute for Policy Studies in Washington has just
> come out with a report called "Paying the Price: The Mounting Costs of
> the Iraq War." We're joined now by IPS Fellow, Phyllis Bennis. Welcome
> to Democracy Now!, Phyllis.
>
> PHYLLIS BENNIS: Good to be with you, Amy.
>
> AMY GOODMAN: Can you lay out these costs?
>
> PHYLLIS BENNIS: We have been very concerned that we're paying such a
> high price for failure in Iraq. More and more people, I think, are
> becoming aware of the number of U.S. troops that have been killed. The
> body count is the one number that remains high in American
> consciousness. We know that as of two days ago when we issued the
> report, the number of U.S. soldiers dead was already 853. It's now
> higher than that. There's been more every day. But other costs are not
> as clearly known. So, for example, the cost to -- in Iraqi lives is
> not commonly known. The fact that more than ten times as many Iraqi
> civilians as U.S. soldiers have been killed is not widely known. That
> body count ranges -- the estimates are difficult to pin down, but the
> lowest estimate is 9,436 Iraqis killed in that same period. People in
> this country get access to very little information about, for example,
> the monetary cost of the war, which so far just to us in this country
> has been over $151 billion, and as a result we don't think very much
> about what other things that money could be used for. The $151 billion
> that we have spent just this year on war and occupation in Iraq could
> pay, for example, for health care for 27 million uninsured Americans.
> It could buy 678,000 fire trucks in cities whose fire departments have
> been decimated. It could put 20 million children into Head Start. So,
> it's a huge economic cost. Every household in this country will pay on
> average $3,415 each over the next three years for U.S. occupation in
> Iraq. The costs are staggering. What we did was to look not only as
> the economic costs and the human costs but also to broaden our
> definition, so we looked at environmental costs. We looked at the
> human rights costs. We looked at the security costs. We're being told,
> for instance, the Bush Administration tells us all the time, that war
> in Iraq is making us safer. Well, in fact, according to the
> International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, which is
> perhaps the most prestigious and influential military institute in
> Europe or the U.S. When they were asked for a quick answer to the
> question "What is the effect on al Qaeda of the war in Iraq?" their
> answer was "accelerated recruitment." This war is not making us safer.
> It's putting us at much greater risk all around the world. The
> question becomes "What is the Iraqi response?" Iraqis are clearly
> paying the highest price in economic terms, in human terms, of course,
> in environmental terms over the long haul, in terms of social and
> political indicators, the loss of sovereignty only being the most
> obvious. Iraqis were asked in a study just about two weeks ago
> conducted by the U.S. occupation authorities their views about the
> occupation. The percentage of Iraqis who expressed "no confidence" in
> either the U.S. occupation authorities, the civilian authorities or in
> the coalition forces was 80%. The percentage of Iraqis who said they
> would feel safer if all U.S. troops left today is 55%. So, this claim
> that somehow the transfer of sovereignty, what is being called the
> transfer of sovereignty, sometimes they try to say transfer of limited
> sovereignty, essentially the equivalent of being a little bit
> pregnant, you can be a little bit sovereign, that somehow this is
> going to answer the problem of Iraqi opposition to the U.S.
> occupation, was put to rest today clearly in this massive escalation,
> this new set of attacks in five different cities leaving at least 70
> people dead, virtually all of them Iraqis. And in that context, that
> clear that the new target for the Iraqi opposition is going to remain
> the people seen, accurately or not, as collaborating with the United
> States. The tragedy, of course, is that of the people killed, not all
> of them are collaborators. There are collaborators. They are not the
> only victims. But all of the victims are Iraqis. So the price that's
> being paid is being paid on a daily basis, and it's mounting. I think
> that when we look at the numbers -- I mean, the -- our report goes on
> for 58 pages of documented statistics and numbers of the costs in the
> -- to the environment, the costs to political legitimacy, the costs to
> human rights. The human rights costs have been horrific. If we look at
> the global costs, for instance, to human rights, the war in Iraq
> particularly, although not only, the escalation of human rights
> violations and torture at Abu Ghraib prisons and the other prisons run
> by the U.S. occupation forces has given a green light to human rights
> violations all around the world. It's legitimized for many governments
> allied with the United States the right to abandon even the claim to
> be abiding by the Geneva Conventions, by other human rights
> instruments, because they can point to the U.S. They can point to not
> only the practice of lower ranking U.S. military officials at Abu
> Ghraib in carrying out this torture, but they can point to the memos
> written by the highest levels of the Bush Administration who talk
> about the need to abandon the Geneva Conventions as quaint, claiming
> that President Bush as commander-in-chief has executive authority to
> ignore all conventions that the United States has signed onto, to
> determine that no soldiers, perhaps, may be automatically entitled to
> Geneva Convention protections, and despite all of President Bush's
> defensive posture regarding, "I never authorized torture," we have to
> look at that in the context of the definition that his administration
> has had of torture. They define torture only as mistreatment that is
> so serious as to cause pain, the equivalent of death or the
> destruction of major organs. Now, if you take that as your definition
> of torture, I'm sure he didn't order torture. The problem is that's
> not the definition in the global understanding of torture, as
> represented in the International Convention Against Torture, which has
> a much, much broader definition of torture, which the Bush
> Administration appears not to even accept. So the cost globally to
> human rights is a huge cost of this war.
>
> AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis Bennis, Fellow at Institute for Policy Studies in
> Washington DC. The report out today is called, "Paying the Price: The
> Mounting Costs of the Iraq War." The website, Phyllis?
>
> PHYLLIS BENNIS: The website is at www.ips-dc.org.
>
> AMY GOODMAN: Thank you very much for joining us.
>
> PHYLLIS BENNIS: Thank you, Amy.
>
> AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!
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