Key U.S. Officials Advocating for War in Ukraine are the Same U.S. Officials who were Responsible for the Iraq Debacle

Joe Biden bears heavy responsibility for the lies leading up to the Iraq war, as well as the needless deaths. His enthusiasm for war led to our willingness to go to war in Ukraines.

Same thing for many other neocons who are responsible for pushing us to the brink of nuclear war in Ukraine. They were also responsible for the tragic Iraq war. These are people currently on Biden's team. This includes Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken. And see here.

Many of the same media stars who pushed the Iraq invasion also pushed the U.S. to get involved in Ukraine. This includes David Frum and Nicolle Wallace and Matthew Dowd and Bill Kristol and Max Boot.

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Why do we honor 6,440 U.S. soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Memorial Day Question: Why do we need to honor 6,440 U.S. soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq? Answer: Because they were asked to go there. To put this day into perspective, I've re-published this image by "ARG" at Pixwit (with permission of the artist): Additional note from the artist:

Chicken Heart Winner (Five-deferment Dick) November 17, 2005: As Vice President Dick Cheney attacks the Democrats for questioning the honesty of the president's warmaking, Congressman John Murtha, himself a decorated Korean War and Vietnam War combat veteran and a staunch warhawk, announces it's time to bring the troops home. Concerning Mr. Cheney's ranting, Murtha resorted to uncharacteristic sarcasm: "I like guys who got five deferments and have never been there and send people to war and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." Concerning Cheney's lack of military service, he's on record: "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

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Unaccountable billions

What kind of idea is this: Let's send $40 billion in paper cash to Iraq on military airplanes and then quickly lose track of how it is being used. What do you think of this idea? Here's the beginning of this surreal story, as reported by Common Dreams.

“Wait, one person?” Shays asked. “One person received $40 billion?” Asked what he thinks about that, Shays said, “It just blows you away.” The enormous undertaking of moving the billions began in the heavily guarded Federal Reserve compound on 100 Orchard Street in East Rutherford, NJ. There, carefully screened employees loaded pallets of cash into tractor-trailers for their journey down I-95 toward Washington, DC. The money came from an account held at the New York Fed called the “Development Fund for Iraq” which was made up of billions of dollars in Saddam Hussein’s financial assets that had been frozen under various US and global sanctions regimes. They weren’t taxpayer dollars, but the US government was responsible for making sure they got where they were going. A typical pallet held 640 bundles, which the handlers called “bricks,” with a thousand bills in each bundle. Each pallet weighed 1,500 pounds, and they were separated by color. Gold seals were used for $100 bills, brown seals held $50 bills, purple seals $20, and so on.

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The cost of America’s warmongering

President Barack Obama recently suggested that America's wars had cost $1 trillion. Reuters suggested that Obama is not being forthright:

Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released on Wednesday. The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion
The study referred to is this one, by Costs of War.  Unlike your local newspaper or your local TV news, this is website that pulls no punches. Here are some of the findings:
  • While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall. Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified.
  • At least 137,000 civilians have died and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict.
  • The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the U.S. helps the Pakistani military fight by funding, equipping and training them, has taken as many lives as the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.
  • Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform and out, brings the total to 225,000.
  • Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions. The current number of war refugees and displaced persons -- 7,800,000 -- is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.
    How disproportionate has been America's response to the 9/11 attacks?  Reuters offers this:

    What followed were three wars in which $50 billion amounts to a rounding error. For every person killed on September 11, another 73 have been killed since.

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    Priorities

    I spotted this quote by Tom Friedman on Daily Dish:

    China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience...; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry... Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.
    The story doesn't end with this helpful and insightful quote. Perhaps, the above quote is an attempt by Friedman to attempt to redeem himself for his pro-war rhetoric from prior years. He has himself to thank for the fact that the U.S. warmongering mentality has caused us to fall so far behind China. And we continue to fall behind China because we can't wake up from our nightmare in which relatively few people armed with unsophisticated weapons such as box-cutters are deemed more dangerous than the Soviet Union at its height, armed with thousands of nuclear warheads. Thus, we will continue to spend more than half of our federal tax revenue on military pursuits. Our exuberant and delusional warmongering is killing our economy and our future.

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