12,000,000,000 Reasons to Get Out of Iraq

Wars Will Destroy Your Future
[Update 3.10.08] Conservatives love to claim that President Ronald Reagan "single handedly" brought down the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s. More educated Americans know this is simply political spin. The Cold War was fought by every president since the end of WWII. Non-partisan experts on the Soviet Union instead point to the Afghan invasion as the final straw in the USSR's demise. The cost of their ill-advised occupation played a significant role in the national collapse.

The plight of American in now in your hands. If you support the US occupation of Iraq, you are endangering your future as well as the future of your kids and grandkids. You can choose to be afraid of the manufactured threat of "Islamo-terrorism" created by the Bush administration or you can be rationally alarmed about an economic meltdown in the United States of America. It's your choice!

Other Recent Iraqi "Success" Headlines

Oil Passes $107 a barrel (it was about $25/barrel before Bush invaded Iraq).
National labor markets lost 63,000 jobs in February, over 20,000 in January.
Stocks continue to extend their losses as the economy sinks deeper into recession.
The US dollar dived to its lowest level against the yen in three years and continued its fall against the Euro.
Gold prices continue to climb nearing the $1,000/ounce mark.
Five U.S. soldiers killed in Baghdad blast.
Woman suicide bombers killed at least 98 people, wounded more than 200 at pet markets.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book that in 2008, the sixth year of the Iraqi occupation, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month -- three tiime the "burn" rate of the war's earliest years [1].

Beyond 2008, working with "best-case" and "realistic-moderate" scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion -- or more -- by 2017. Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) completed their own projections, which are slightly lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs. Variations in estimates derive from differing assumptions, scenarios and which budget items are counted. Yet regardless the estimate and assumptions you want to believe, auditors of the Government Accountability Office are in agreement that the costs will be huge.

In the book by Stiglitz and Bilmes, "The Three Trillion Dollar War," the authors report that the two wars will have cost the U.S. budget $845 billion September 30, end of fiscal year 2008. That counts not just military operations, but embassy costs, reconstruction and other war-related expenses.

Shockingly, this estimate far surpasses the $670 billion in 2007 dollars the Congressional Research Service says the US taxpayers paid for the 12-year Vietnam War.

Although some reports suggest that American military and Iraqi civilian casualties have declined in recent months, the rate of spending has shot up. The fully funded 2008 war budget will be 155 percent higher than in 2004.

Why is the Iraqi occupation costing more? Several reasons lead to the increases in costs: the "surge" of additional U.S. units into Iraq; rising fuel costs; larger bonuses to attract re-enlistments by service personnel; and particularly the need to repair or replace worn-out, destroyed or damaged military equipment. The Congress appropriated an additional $17 billion this year for advanced armored vehicles to protect troops against roadside bombs.

After Spending So Much Money, Is It Working?

Newly declassified statistics on the frequency of insurgent attacks in Iraq suggest that after major security gains last fall in the wake of an American troop increase, the conflict has drifted into a stalemate, with levels of violence remaining stubbornly constant from November 2007 through early 2008.
Attacks in Iraq 2003-2008

"While security has improved in Iraq, a permissive security environment has yet to be achieved," David M. Walker, the top official at the Government Accountability Office wrote, using a term meaning an environment safe for ordinary business and social activity [2].