Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [116]
The money being tossed around in the name of bringing democracy to the Iraqis is staggering. By the fall of 2007, it had cost $464 billion. Bush’s new budget included an extra $100 billion for a year more of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was on top of $70 billion that Congress had already allocated, plus almost $142 billion for 2008. This means that the spending on the almost five-year-old Iraq War is about to surpass the cost of thirteen years in Vietnam. Prior to invading, Donald Rumsfeld said that Iraq’s oil would pay for everything. So much for that big idea. Now Bush has vetoed a bill for child health insurance because of so-called “pork barrel” politics. Well, I’d rather err on insuring kids than on the fiasco we’re involved in over there.
The fact is, this war is not only draining America’s resources, it’s likely to eventually bankrupt us. And who is paying the biggest price? When you realize that the new Bush budget also cuts $66 billion out of Medicare payments to the elderly over the next five years, and another $12 billion out of Medicaid for the poor, it’s kind of a no-brainer. The New York Times recently noted that, for what the war is costing, we could’ve instituted universal health care, provided a nursery school education for every threeand four-year-old, and immunized kids around the world against numerous diseases—and still had half the money left over.
At the same time, shortly before we turned over supposed control to the Iraqis, the U.S. Federal Reserve sent over, on military aircraft, the biggest cash shipments it’s ever made—more than $4 billion, amounting to 363 tons of dollars on these huge pallets! The funds came from assets frozen from Saddam Hussein’s regime, as well as oil exports. They’d been requested by the new Iraqi minister of finance, but there was so little accountability that nobody knows how much actually ended up in the hands of the insurgents.
Speaking of big bucks, there’s also a new revenue-sharing plan for Iraq’s oil. After the Saudis, Iraq has the second biggest oil reserves in the world, and now its National Oil Company is going to hold exclusive control over just seventeen of the eighty known oil fields. The rest, and the ones yet to be discovered, are all going to be open to foreign control. This is just in case you thought there was any rationale for our being in Iraq other than our dependency on oil.
As of my completing this book in the fall of 2007, close to 4,000 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and almost 30,000 more have been wounded. The majority of casualties on the other side, as in all wars, have been civilians. A scholarly paper that appeared in Lancet (October 2006) estimated that about 650,000 Iraqi civilians—including huge numbers of women, children, and the elderly—have died since the Americans came in. True, many of them have been caught up in a civil war, but that sure wouldn’t have happened without our intervention.
The terrible truth is, even with as many people as Saddam Hussein had to eliminate to stay in power, the Iraqis are a whole lot worse off today than under his regime. Let’s imagine that we had a dictator, and some outside force came into our country and took him out. And things did not get better; they deteriorated. How would we then feel about whoever did this to us? It comes back to the old cliché: the enemy known, as opposed to the one unknown. At least they