What is the cost of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? The cost, which will continue to mount for decades, is staggering, even insane. It wasn’t $50 B, as W stated; it’s already in the trillions. Here are the numbers from the Washington Post [1]. The reason for the U.S. invasion and occupation? Unknown. The deleterious effect on the soldiers, their families and the U.S. economy? Long term and devastating. For the hawks, it was fun going in with all those fancy weapons blazing, but they are not offering any ideas as far as cleaning up this catastrophic mess. And those hawks have absolutely nothing to offer to the massive number of Iraqi refugees, who have spilled all over the Middle East, placing an enormous burden on Syria and Jordan. [2]
And combat is not “over,” [2]per the recent lies of the Obama Administration. And the corrupt corporate media is, for the most part, not calling out the Obama Administration for this recent fabrication any more than they confronted the U.S. for the fictitious “reasons” for invading in the first place. The media excels at serving as official stenographer for U.S. politicians whenever the topic is war [3] (and see this piece on a documentary by Phil Donahue [4], and this article regarding Amy Goodman’s views [5] about the additional failures of the media). The corporate media bears thus much of the blame for the bleak economic future of the U.S. 
[6]
It looks like the U.S. didn’t plan this “war” any better than they figured out how to make airplanes safe from terrorists prior to 2001. Hundreds of high-paid counter-terrorism experts on the U.S. payroll and they couldn’t figure out to lock the cockpit doors to keep a suicidal terrorist (of which many were known prior to 2001) from disabling the pilot and crashing the plane. And then we come up with a brilliant plan that forbids passengers from bringing finger nail clippers onto the planes.
I’m convinced that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was caused by bigoted conservatives who were seething after the U.S. was shown to be inept as far as airline safety, allowing non-Caucasian men armed with only box-cutters to wreak havoc. They couldn’t bear to look in the mirror and accept the blame, so they lashed out by raining bombs all over Iraq, even though the exercise helped to destroy the U.S. economy. It was like going home after work and kicking the dog because your boss yelled at you. The invasion of Iraq looked attractive because we were pissed and embarrassed, and what Iraq amounted to was causing more damage to the U.S. Long term damage to our economy, which means starving our schools, libraries, research, and infrastructure, just so we could brag that we took out Saddam. Or, perhaps, that Saddam was merely the excuse for public consumption, and the real purpose of the “war” was mainly to make immense amounts of money for military-related industries [7] that had members of Congress in their pocket.
The history yet to be written will judge us to be fools. Maybe that judgment will provoke us to invade yet another country and squander what we have left of our economy. Maybe Americans will try to defend themselves by claiming that they had good intentions. They should have known better, however. As Hannah Arendt wrote long ago [8], far more damage is caused by the failure to think things through than by trying to cause damage.
Print this post [9]
[10]