At What Cost?

The question above is asked on the site of the Commission on Wartime Contracting as to their recently released report.

Remember the meme at the beginning of the War Drum Beating and the easy certain Corporate "No Bid Contracts" in support of the Wars and Occupations: "They're the only ones in the World who can do the organizing and work needed in support of our Military and the Coalition of Willing!"

Never mind they were connected by the hips to those beating the drums, never mind they were only paper pushers tens of thousands of miles away and sub-contracting out all the work, never mind the many issues of lost billions, shoddy work, bonuses, waste and corruption that almost instantly started coming to light and even with that they were given more, not even handshakes, just here ya go Pallets with Shrink wrapped Blocks of Cash, Millions and Billions, freshly printed and minted!!

I had similar questions as this LTE writer asks, well before the report was issued the other day and this posted today, but than again many of us have had the questions of Defense Spending for years, with extremely little questioning from the greater masses. Especially us Veterans of our previous failed policies as we've watched our brothers and sisters being short changed for their service, short changed and no questions or willingness from the greater masses who don't serve!

No tea parties over billions lost in Iraq?

Where are the tea parties? Where is the outrage from the purveyors of the vaunted, unregulated “free market?”

The Wartime Contracting Commission reports that tens of billions have been wasted on private sector contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, due to “poorly defined work orders, inadequate oversight and contractor inefficiencies.”...........

The following was released a few days ago, yet I've heard very little talk from the talking heads, Especially the opinionated right wing spinmeisters, they have alot to say about everything else, in this country or so called libertarians and very little from the left, All War Drum Beating Supporters Of, remember there was some seventy five plus percent in favor of destroying an innocent country and many still in favor of occupying two countries while bombing another!

Commission on Wartime Contracting

Contingency Contracting In Iraq and Afghanistan

Interim Report to Congress: 121page PDF

Since 2001, Congress has appropriated about $830 billion to fund U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over that period, America’s reliance on contractors has grown to unprecedented proportions to support logistics, security, and reconstruction efforts related to those operations. More than 240,000 contractor employees—about 80 percent of them foreign nationals—now work in Iraq and Afghanistan, supporting the Department of Defense. Additional contractor employees support the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Dude, Where's My Money?

Waste, Fraud, and Abuse: three words used in an official report describing what has happened to the 380 billion US dollars spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Contractor oversees security guards in Afghanistan

A major security contractor is running an office overseeing armed guards in Afghanistan, a situation at odds with the Pentagon's claim that military officers would be in charge of such sensitive work.

A new report on wartime spending to be made public Wednesday at a congressional hearing says the contractor, Aegis Defense Services, has operated with limited U.S. government supervision...............

War contractor bonuses an outrage

Yes, bonuses paid to the contractors that rival the corporate bonuses paid here..............

US military wasted taxpayer money in Iraq: Report

The first audit released by US Congressional Commission of Wartime Contracting reveals that the military has wasted huge sums of its USD 834b budget on contractors.

The 121-page report on security, logistics and renovation contracts indicates that the US government has failed to oversee the defense expenditures it disbursed to key contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report refers to large-scale cases of fraud and mismanagement of contracts during the so-called 'war on terror', which have cost American taxpayers 'billions' of dollars.................

US Senators Webb & McCaskill ask Secretary of Defense to review findings, address immediate concerns identified in wartime contracting commission Report

Following today’s release of the Commission on Wartime Contracting’s interim report to Congress, Senators Jim Webb (D-VA) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) asked Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to review the Commission’s findings and address a number of critical issues of “immediate concern.”..............

Again the question should be asked "No tea parties over billions lost in Iraq or Afghanistan?" which won't be answered even at further so called "teabaggin" rallies, certainly not by the speakers invited!

This goes along with another question asked years back now by a GoldStar Mom, "For What Noble Cause Mr. President?"!!

Oh, before I go, one more issue and another question, especially to the masses who never serve but cheer on:

If We Truly Face Up to What We’ve Done

Losing the future

by Robert C. Koehler
March 5, 2008

A certain reverence is required just to approach the book’s title: The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
by noted economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. I can see why they understated it.

The pulse of outrage beats behind the cold calculations in this concise volume, newly published by Norton. We’re not just “losing” this tragic, arrogantly unplanned war in the conventional sense of failing to subdue our enemies — we’re committing slow socioeconomic suicide with its open-ended pursuit, losing, as we plunge recklessly into debt over it, our options, our ability to choose. We’re losing the future.

“Because of the war, the national deficit is $2 trillion higher,” Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, told me. “At 5 percent interest, that’s $100 billion a year, year after year after year — forever!”

Such numbers are beyond the scope of the human imagination. To begin putting the war into financial perspective, Stiglitz suggested that we need a new unit of account: “Think of what things would cost in terms of hours, days, weeks of fighting.”

For instance, he said, “Three years ago we had a financial crisis with the Social Security system. For one-sixth of an Iraq war, you could have fixed Social Security for the next 50 to 75 years.”

Or how about health insurance for children? Remember when President Bush vetoed a bill to expand it? “We’re talking about days of fighting in Iraq,” Stiglitz said.

Or, hmm, what about the fact that suddenly one of every 150 children is being diagnosed with autism? The cost of serious research on this issue? “Four hours of an Iraq war!”

(Note: The American Friends Service Committee has a Web page devoted to the Iraq war as a unit of account. )

Before we begin a serious waltz with the current war numbers that Stiglitz and Bilmes force us to confront in their book, let’s ponder some far easier stats. Remember Gulf War I? We drove Saddam out of Kuwait, racking up huge kills in the process and sustaining a mere 148 of our own dead and another 467 injured. Combat operations lasted a month. What’s more, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait paid for most of it — it was practically a free war.

Except, as Stiglitz and Bilmes point out, in the aftermath of this quickie, yellow-ribbon-festooned war, vets started getting sick — started dying — of mysterious maladies that came to be called Gulf War Syndrome. Some 17 years later, “the United States still spends over $4.3 billion each year paying compensation, pension and disability benefits to more than 200,000 veterans of the Gulf War,” they write. “We have already spent over $50 billion in Gulf War I disability benefits.”

Almost two decades later, our tax dollars are still disappearing down the gaping maw of this monthlong war. Now, consider that the current Iraq war is five years old this month and counting (John McCain is ready to go at it for another hundred), and we’ve been in Afghanistan so far for six and a half years. The secret and terrible costs of these wars are growing, growing, growing; and they are exponentially greater than the still enormously expensive, and forgotten, Gulf War I.

Just the cost of care for physically and emotionally injured vets for these two protracted wars — in which our GIs are being forced to return for two, three and even more tours of duty — will run, the authors estimate, to more than $700 billion. And, they note, the care the government refuses to pay for doesn’t simply disappear as a cost. It falls on the families themselves. Someone pays it, so it’s part of the total.

Stiglitz and Bilmes do more than ferret out the operational, medical and other war costs hidden in various parts of the national budget. When they also factor in reasonable estimates of the macroeconomic costs (including interest on our staggering debt, the war-triggered increases in the price of oil), they are forced to add another $2 trillion to the cost of the war.

When they press on with their analysis and begin calculating the global costs as well — including such arcane and disconcerting calculations as the value of an Iraqi life figured, in terms of lost income generation, at 7 percent of an American life — suddenly there’s another $6 trillion. Add it up, if you dare, and you wind up in the neighborhood of $11 trillion. Helluva neighborhood.

But there’s more to the book than numbers. The authors are clearly aware that to a certain extent they are calculating the incalculable: the value of our lost national credibility (“We have become toxic”); the value of human life; the value of shattered hopes. For instance, “The majority of Iraqi children are not attending school,” they note at one point.

The authors move on, but this is where I’ll stop. If we truly face up to what we’ve done, we’ll never go to war again.

---
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com. © 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Still working on that 'Successful Surge'!

We all know the Why for the 'Surge', we all know the spin of the Success stories of that 'Surge', which seem to always overlook the 'Why'.

Well here's another example of why the 'Why' still hasn't been achieved, even with the many Walls built around Ethnically Cleansed Neighborhoods

A suicide bomber has killed eight Iraqis, including soldiers, in an attack on Army Day celebrations.

Army Day - a public holiday in Iraq - marks the anniversary of the founding of the Iraqi Army in 1921 with its first battalion, the Musa Al-Kadhem and involves high-ranking officers and government officials as well as Iraqi soldiers.

You can watch the BBC Video of the celebrations and bombing in another one of those 'Safe Neighborhoods' of Baghdad.

When will we start being Honest with Ourselves, as the World already knows, about What We Have Done?

When will those seeking the job of President not only be Honest to the American People, who hopefully will be doing the hiring, and not the Supremes, about the Depths of Hatreds created and Destruction of our Morality as a Nation, but also be Honest with themselves about what this Nation Now Faces?

When will We, as a Nation, start holding those Responsible, Accountable??

The Key....

involves high-ranking officers and government officials as well as Iraqi soldiers.

Yep the 'Surge' is doin wonders giving the 'Government of Iraq' the Space Needed to Govern and Protect!!