The shifting purpose of the military occupation of iraq

Today, Arianna Huffington reviewed the long history of shifting rationalizations for having a huge U.S. military occupation of Iraq:

The White House served up a blast from the past this week with word that it was planning to rebrand the Iraq war -- something the Bushies did quite often. Come Sept. 1, it will be good-bye "Operation Iraqi Freedom," hello "Operation New Dawn"! This New Dawn will, incidentally, still see 50,000 U.S. troops left in Iraq. So we started with 2001's "Gathering Threat" and 2002's "Axis of Evil," moved to 2003's "Shock and Awe" and "Mission Accomplished," then pinballed from "Fight 'em There, Not Here" ('04) to "Last Throes" ('05) to "Stay the Course" ('05) to "The New Way Forward" ('06). "Operation New Dawn" sounds like "A New Way of Forgetting This Ever Happened." It's time to brand the war what it always was -- "A Huge, Tragic Mistake" -- and get the hell out.
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Cost of our new high-speed trains is dwarfed by the tax dollars we waste in our Afghanistan and Iraq “wars.”

President Obama has recently announced that he will allocate $8 billion ($4 billion each year, over two years) to develop a new system of high-speed passenger rail service. This is an excellent idea. The new rail lines will be created within 10 geographical corridors ranging from 100 to 600 miles long. Note, however, that the high-speed rail line system will be an extremely expensive project, and that the $8 billion bill will need to be paid by 138 million tax-paying Americans. Dividing the $8 billion cost by the number of taxpayers, we can see that, on average, each taxpayer will pay almost $60 ($30 per year, for two years) to support this massive new high-speed rail service. Again, this high-speed rail project will cost an immense amount of money. Consider, though, how small this pile of rail money looks when compared to the amount of money we are wasting in the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan. For 2009, the United States spent approximately $87 billion for Iraq and $47 billion for Afghanistan. The fiscal 2010 budget requests $65 billion for Afghanistan operations and $61 billion for Iraq. the cost of these two "wars" together is $126 billion for 2010. Compare these expenditures on a bar chart: Graph by Erich Vieth

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Ashleigh Banfield’s story of wartime censorship

Ashleigh Banfield has finally gotten hired back to work at a major network, after losing her job at MSNBC in 2003 for speaking out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Here's what she had to say back in 2003, which caused her to lose her job. She is speaking of what you are not shown by the news media when the nation is at war:

What didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.
Banfield also has some critically important things to say about the "Fox News effect" (the patriotizing and glorification of war). Reading this Huffpo post about Banfield reminds me of this post featuring similar comments by Amy Goodman. It also reminds me how Phil Donahue also lost his job at MSNBC for being critical of the Iraq invasion (more about Donahue's views here). These sorts of firings are actually predictable. The documentary "War Made Easy" reminds us that hawks close ranks around Presidents who start wars and they also put tremendous pressure on networks to do the same. Banfield's story reminds us that we need to strive to keep dissenting voices prominent during times of war because something about war makes us insanely fearful and even less able to reason than in times of peace. It is during times of war that we become collectively willing to let ourselves run amok wrapped in the flag.

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What does this say about the government we support in Iraq?

Yes, Blackwater paid a million bucks to bribe Iraqi officials to placate those officials and thus allow Blackwater to continue garnering a huge paycheck in Iraq. Lots of people are rightfully pissed at Blackwater. But what does this say about the Iraqi government that more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers died to establish? Imagine this in 2003: Dick Cheney tells the public that we're going to spend one trillion dollars and allow 3,000 U.S. soldiers to die in order to establish a corrupt Iraqi government when we don't actually know whether Iraq has any plans to attack the United States. How much support would there have been for that kind of needless military adventure?

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Iraq journalism applied to Iran

According to Glenn Greenwald, if you want to see what Iraq journalism looked like, read the the hyped up news on Iran. Take, for example a recent Washington Times piece by Toby Warrick, which is:

purely one-sided, unquestioning and entirely anonymous series of dubious, unverified, fear-mongering assertions that can have no purpose other than to create the most sinister picture of the "Iranian threat" possible.

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