See the full length film on the BBC website: US troops' anger on Iraq duty (16'44")
So often you hear others speaking for the troops, so it's refreshing to just hear them have their say.
This war is stupid and pointless. This is not our country, not our fight. We're in the middle of a civil war that's been going on for a couple of thousand years now. This war's costing my country billions of dollars a month - I think the last count was between 4 and 12 billion dollars a month. This war's contributing to the collapse of our economy and the devaluization of the American dollar and it's just stupid and pointless and ruining our country.
In his linking of the war to the present economic problems I think Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz might agree. He has calculated the true cost of the war at $3 trillion (at least), but says the Bush administration kept this cost hidden. Rather than raising taxes, as would normally done in a time of war, the Iraq war was paid for on credit. As The Guardian reports
the Federal Reserve colluded in this obfuscation, because it "kept interest rates lower than they otherwise might have been, and looked the other way as lending standards were lowered, thereby encouraging households to borrow more - and spend more."
In addition, the war contributed to soaring oil prices.
Money that used to be spent on American goods now got diverted abroad.
Joseph Stiglitz is co-author with Linda Bilmes of The Three Trillion Dollar War. He was interviewed by CNN a couple of days ago.