Joe W.
>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
>Subject: [lbo-talk] an interview
>Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 18:06:21 -0400
>
>[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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