If one reads Elizabeth Flock's Washington Post blog post from yesterday afternoon, All U.S. troops to leave Iraq; war by the numbers, one finds the total cost of$ 3 trillion offered several years ago by the Nobel Laureate confirmed with a link to this piece in Stars and Stripes. Among the other figures, besides the total death total of US Troops (not including contractors/mercenaries) of 4,459, are these:
9 billion: Dollars lost and unaccounted for in Iraq as of 2010, according to Russia Times.
500 billion: Cost of medical care and disability compensation dollars for Iraq war veterans over their lifetimes, according to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.
The last figure is actually from testimony before the Committee by Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Defense.
In reading these figures this morning, my mind immediately returned to Matt Taibbi's appearance with Keith Olbermann and this 2006 piece at Alternet.
We can talk all we want about the corruption of Wall Street banks and their influence, but unless and until we can rein in the power of the Military Industrial complex, about which Eisenhower warned us more than half a century ago, we will continue to see travesties like Iraq and our other recent and current military adventures.
A few thoughts of my own below the fold.
Were I not recovering from surgery, I would be putting together all of the material I have encountered that has tried to warn the American people of what was happening. We had Howard Zinn, we have had Michael Moore and Andrew Bacevich and all the folks at Alternet. There have been pieces in Main Stream Media and too many too count in the alternative sources to which many of us here turn. There are clear and precise pieces in overseas news outlets.
Somehow we seem unwilling in our society to address the reality of what has happened, what continues to happen even now.
There is corruption, starting with the Congress imposing weapons systems that the military does not want because it means jobs in districts and states and thus political contributions and votes for the Members and Senators.
There is lack of oversight within the military because too many involved in contracting are looking forward to post-retirement positions that will pay them more than their pensions, and sometimes more than their highest military grade.
Americans die in unnecessary conflicts fought because we can - because we have weapons no one else has, because with a military larger and more expensive than at least the next 17 natioins and almost as expensive as that of the entire rest of the world, the temptation to resort to force when it is not the most effective way of addressing the issues at hand is simply too great.
And if the political costs become too great because of the deaths of American military, farm it out to Blackwater/XE and similar companies, including the security of American officials and even the gathering and interpretation of intelligence intended to help clarify what we are doing and why. And then, use unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones. In dozens of countries. Little direct risk to American military personnel even if the "collateral damage" of deaths of innocent civilians outrages and inflames thereby damaging the US more than any gain in the deaths of supposed terrorists, including some with US Citizenship
Stiglitz was right, prescient in the financial costs.
Bacevich is right about the moral costs to this nation, costs about which he has written both in op ed pieces and in powerful books.
Yet still we careen down this path of destruction.
The moral and political costs dwarf the financial costs.
Yet we do little about the corruption in the process, because the very process is corrupting.
With Citizens United having unleashed the corporations even more, this will change no more than the lack of regulation of Wall Street and other big and powerful financial institutions.
It is no longer that they are too big to fail.
It is that they are, at least collectively, bigger and more powerful than any government's ability to regulate them, and they know it.
We give them money without appropriate oversight, and then are surprised when it produces neither useful or effective products or an increase in lending to small business nor relief to overstressed homeowners.
Some, including on the Democratic side of the aisles, say we cannot afford to look bacjk. They bamboozle the American people with a promise of jobs, yet export jobs overseas and slash the salaries and benefits of those workers who remain in the US, always with the implicit threat that those jobs as well can be exported. Meanwhile profits soar, bonuses explode, and the rest of us suffer and get the burden of paying the costs - through higher taxes, through bankruptcies, through elimination of social services, through privatization of what should be public functions.
Gogl provided an image of the Russian Empire careening out of control,an image of troika careening across the winter landscape, in his powerful novel Dead Souls, I look at current-day American and wonder if our nation is now not more like that troika than was the Russia of the 19th century. And while Gogl's title is ironic in some ways, I see it as applicable to too many in the US, too many who acquiesce in the gathering of power into fewer and fewer hands with less and less oversight, as more and more people and institutions get corrupted by the temptation of wealth and power.
Eisenhower's was an early voice. There are many voices today. Joe Stiglitz was one such voice. He and Eisenhower were Cassandras, warning of the forthcoming doom, but ignored EVEN THOUGH THEIR WARNINGS WERE TRUE - they were not believed, and we all suffer.
We should remember that Cassandra was correct in her warning to beware the Greeks bearing gifts. As we should beware the promises of security and wealth and jobs offered by those who have convinced too many to continue down the path that is destroying us.
IS that enough of a screed for an early Sunday morning? I worry that is is not screed enough.