Bad American

 Associated Press

Such a splendid little war George W. Bush has given us. When I tell my oldest son to take his dual degrees in computer science engineering and Japanese and then get the hell out of the United States, this is why.

We’re currently living in a country run by a madman and his henchmen. But hey, Halliburton and all the other ‘right people’ are making money, so who cares, right?

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.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in 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 cost.

“Would the American people have had a different attitude towards going to war had they known the total cost?” Bilmes and Staglitz wrote in their report. “We might have conducted the war in a manner different from the way we did.”

It’s hard to comprehend just how much money $2 trillion is. Even Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world, would marvel at this amount. But once you begin to look at what that money could buy, the worldwide impact of fighting this largely unpopular war becomes clear.

Consider that, according to sources like Jeffrey Sachs, the Worldwatch Institute, and the UN, with that same money the world could:

• Eliminate extreme poverty around the world (cost $135 billion in the first year, rising to $195 billion by 2015)
• Achieve universal literacy (cost $5 billion a year)
• Immunize every child in the world against deadly diseases (cost $1.3 billion a year)
• Ensure developing countries have enough money to fight the AIDS epidemic (cost $15 billion per year)

In other words, for a cost of $156.3 billion this year alone — less than a tenth of the total Iraq war budget — we could lift entire countries out of poverty, teach every person in the world to read and write, significantly reduce child mortality, while making huge leaps in the battle against AIDS, saving millions of lives.

Then the remaining money could be put toward the $40-$60 billion annually the World Bank says is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, established by world leaders in 2000 to tackle everything from gender inequality to environmental sustainability.

The implications of this cannot be underestimated. It means that a better and more just world is far within reach, if we are willing to shift our priorities.

But we’re not. Mass murder in the name of ‘freedom’ is just too damn fun and profitable.

And for Americans it makes great TV.

But hey, the good news is it won’t be too much longer, according to Stiglitz and others, before the United States is flat busted broke and then other nations who are holding title to our children’s future, will step in and take control.

Oh, and as for the Iraqis (as if we care about the people we supposedly ‘liberated?’:

No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.

We utterly destroyed this country and slaughtered thousands of its citizens and yet, even Hillary Clinton says the Iraqi people have to ’step up’ and fix their own country. The one that we destroyed. That’s more than enough reason to never vote for her but, again, most Americans could give a fat rat’s ass about what happens to the Iraqis. Their just pawns in our giant chess game to preserve our ’sacred way of life.’

Of course, in America, stupidity rules over rationality: