As the initial number of victims following the Southeast Asian tsunami reached ten times that of 9/11, America answered the call for aid with a mere $15 million. That’s equivalent to the amount we pour into Iraq every two hours or roughly a nickel for each American citizen. Following criticisms from the U.N. that the wealthiest countries of the world are among the stingiest (and the death toll doubled), the U.S. kicked in another $20 million. Compare this to the $15 billion airline bailout and the $34 billion paid out to 9/11 victims. Brother, can you spare a dime?
I can understand voting for Bush if you’re a social conservative who believes that Bush will pack the Supreme Court in order to ban abortion and recriminalize homosexuality. But if you’re a fiscal conservative or military hawk, this president has proven to be an unqualified failure. Past leaders have weathered deeper recessions and fought greater wars without such miserable economic results. Bush has given us record deficits while losing jobs. We’re spending more money on Iraq than on homeland security and the result is that terrorism is on the rise. We can’t afford any more of Bush’s bad policy decisions and broken promises.
In Bush’s latest TV commercial, he again invokes the memory of 9/11 to bolster prospects for his “reelection” and ends by saying, “We must do everything in our power to bring an enemy to justice before they hurt us again.” This is the same man who arrogantly boasted, “I just don't spend that much time on [Bin Laden].” the same man who then took America virtually alone into the quagmire of Iraq and is spending 4 times the money settling his father’s old scores there rather than pursuing Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Bush’s go-it-alone foreign policy has turned allies into enemies and has resulted in increased incidents of terrorism worldwide. America will be safer only when this cowboy goes back to Crawford.
http://www.georgewbush.com
http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/peace/archives/2002/march/03140a.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-09-07-cover-costs_x.htm
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/9/131422/3518
The cost of Dubya'a plan to bring democracy to Iraq is equivalent to blowing 100 space shuttles out of the sky, crew and all.
03/19/04 STAY THE COURSE OR REGIME
CHANGE AT HOME?
Following the capture of Saddam, Americans may be sleeping better at night. But after the euphoria passes, will they finally wake up to realize the foolishness of Bush’s pre-emptive war? The president keeps pointing to 9/11 in defense of his actions, evoking the memory of its 3000 victims. Yet he doesn’t seem to know or care about the more than 8000 Iraqi civilians killed by crossfire, coalition cluster bombs and misguided missiles. He touts the increase in vaccinations for the Iraqis but seems oblivious to the fact that 30,000 Americans will die this year from the flu. With 459 American casualties, we all want to tell our troops “Job well done,” but we must come to terms with the fact that Bush has created more terrorists in the process and turned European allies into enemies. This is the legacy of a man who had never even been to Europe until the Supreme Court selected him president.
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The US led coalition killed twice as many Iraqi civilians than the number of victims of 9/11. Despite the premise that a Baghdad sponsored strike on America was imminent, we now know that evidence Saddam was reconstituting a nuclear program was false or even falsified, there were no stockpiles of chemical weapons, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
What have we actually gained by this $90 billion boondoggle? We are rebuilding Baghdad University and raising tuition rates in Oregon up to 14%. We struggle to care for Iraq’s continuing count of war wounded while efforts for healthcare reform at home die on the vine. There are plans to put as many as 250,000 Iraqi soldiers on the US payroll, even as the Pentagon planned to cut combat pay for US soldiers serving (and dying) abroad.
America launched its attack on Iraq in defiance of the UN. Now the President is begging money from allies previously snubbed. With a current “burn rate” of $4 billion per month, expect higher taxes or deeper deficits before Europe bails us out. Are you still unwilling to finally admit that this “pre-emptive” war was a mistake? Then it’s time to shut up and pay up.
In two short weeks of war over 98 allied soldiers have perished or gone missing. The total cost in lives lost, bombs dropped and resources squandered is the same as if a fully manned space shuttle had been blown out of the sky each day since we first attacked Iraq. Operation “Shock and Awe” (better called “shame and horror”) has killed over 700 civilians, and yet we are meant to believe that 70% of us support this “preemptive war” which violates the UN charter.
The 9/11 terrorists came neither from Iraq nor armed with weapons of mass destruction. Our greatest threat of terrorism comes not from chemical weapons but rather from creating more terrorists. With every passing day and each new image of mothers wailing over dead children, don’t be surprised when grief turns to rage as this fiasco in Iraq makes our country less secure, not more.
After 4 days of war, 28 allied soldiers have already perished in crashes and in combat. The total cost in lives lost, bombs dropped and resources squandered is the same as if 4 manned space shuttles had been blown out of the sky. Do a majority of Americans truly support the notion of “pre-emptive” war (which by the way violates international law)? One single day of battle saw 600 missiles (at a million dollars a piece) lobbed at Iraqi cities. The operation is called “shock and awe” and the aim is to terrorize the Iraqi people. We flaunt our newest weapon, MOAB, a 20 ton bomb with a blast so large, it has been compared to a small nuclear weapon and we continue to use munitions coated with depleted uranium. There’s no doubt that we can crush Iraq using such tactics but the result will likely be more terrorism, not less.
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You have to hand it to our pro-war France bashers. What they lack in loyalty, they make up for in shear ignorance. Sure, France supported our independence when we had that little spat with the Brits known as the Revolutionary War, but what have they done for us lately? So change French Fries (a Belgian dish originally) to Freedom Fries. Get rid of French Toast (the 1724 reinvention of Albany, NY tavern owner Joseph French). Let’s replace the Statue of Liberté (a gift from the French) with a sculpture of Laura Bush. And while we’re at it, down with démocratie. (Yes, we get the word from French.) Dubya doesn’t much have a hankering for democracy, anyway. Where would he be today if America had majority rule?
P.S. Now the US is going to war without even seeking first the UN vote which Bush had promised during his recent press conference. His reason for reneging? France was threatening to veto. (Nevermind that we couldn’t even buy the votes of security council members such as Angola, Cameroon and Guinea, much less sell our position to our neighbor to the south, Mexico.) When it comes to thwarting the will of the international community, the US has racked up 4 times the number of UN vetoes than that of France. Still, it’s easier to blame the French for Bush’s failures in diplomacy.
While local jails release criminals into our neighborhoods, the Bush government is paying Dick Cheney’s old oil company Halliburton some $37.3 million to build 816 detention cells in Cuba for POWs captured in Afghanistan. At $46,000 a cell are we really getting our money’s worth? Halliburton has recently paid a $2 million fine for overbilling the government $6 million on a previous contract (a net gain for Cheney’s corrupt corporation), but that’s just the tip of the trough. A year after Cheney became CEO of Halliburton, the U.S. GAO cited it as the primary source of $327 million in cost overruns. In defiance of the US led embargo against Iraq, Halliburton made $73 million doing business with Saddam Hussein (hidden through foreign subsidiaries) and has already secured contracts to rebuild Iraq after Bush’s “preemptive” war. Meanwhile, Cheney continues to get a million dollars a year from Halliburton in "deffered compensation." Hail to the Thief.
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Isn’t it odd? George W. Bush, in defiance of the UN, wants to attack Iraq in a “preemptive” war. Why? Because he insists that Iraq is defying UN resolutions. This is hypocrisy at its finest. Bush likes to underscore that it’s been 12 years of Iraqi noncompliance, but is their record the worst in the region? Israel, with its settlements in Palestinian territories has been thumbing its nose at the UN twice as long. The UN first condemned Israel’s actions in 1979 for its illegal settlements in occupied Palestine. (An earlier resolution in 1972 would have passed the UN citing Israel for human rights violations in the occupied territories but for a single no-vote, a US veto cast by none other than George Herber Walker Bush.) In the past 30 years the US has used it’s UN veto power to shield Israel some 34 times, often standing alone in defense of Israeli aggressions. The weapons inspectors have yet to find any evidence of chemical or nuclear weapons and those much ballyhooed missiles that the Iraqis are currently destroying hardly pose a threat to America. It’s time to ask what’s the real reason Bush wants this unholy war.
In the Gulf War, the US began using missiles coated with Depleted Uranium, a waste product of nuclear weapons manufacturing with a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years. In 1991 we dumped 320 tons of Depleted Uranium on Iraq, and have since used these weapons of mass destruction in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. What have been the consequences for the Iraqi people we claim we intend to “liberate”? There are now 10 times as many cases of birth defects. The Christian Science Monitor reports that “pre-war cancer rates have increased 11-fold; the mortality rate 19-fold.” But why should we care, since we all know that we’re not going to war again for the sake of the Iraqi people. Well, what goes around comes around. The VA has authorized disability benefits for 1 in 4 Gulf War vets suffering from “Gulf War Syndrome.” (see also and also) How long will this use of our own homegrown dirty bombs remain America’s dirty secret?
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The President’s statement that we will not target civilians in Iraq is an empty promise. Even with “smart bombs,” we still suffer from faulty intelligence. In 1988 (Iran-Iraq war), the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger jet, mistaking it for an F-14, killing all 290 aboard. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was accidentally destroyed by NATO bombers in 1999 (Kosovo Conflict), killing three. Most recently in Afghanistan, more US soldiers had died in the first 6 months of the war through friendly fire than at the hands of the Taliban. Other mistaken targets include a wedding party resulting in 50 dead and the December 2001 strike by a B-52 bomber which killed 3 Americans, 25 friendly Afghanis and wounded US backed Afghan leader Hamid Karzai on his way to his installation ceremony as Afghanistan's interim Prime Minister. The 10,000 Iraqi civilian casualties of the first Gulf War are called euphemistically “collateral damage.” (The 600,000 Iraqi children under age five who have died since 1991 are merely a statistic.) Some may call it a war crime.
What if I told you that President Bush was planning on blowing up 40 more space shuttles, crews and all? Would you support this action if you were convinced that doing so would rid one particular region of the world of terrorism? This is precisely the scenario and outcome we all must expect if we again go to war in Iraq. In the first Gulf War, the US lost 293 soldiers (a mercifully low number) in an operation which cost $61 billion; the equivalent of 40 manned space shuttles. How can a nation with one hand mournfully lower flags to half staff while waving them in the other hand so eagerly in support of this “preemptive” war?
