The war of Bush, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz, INC will cost us $75 billion just for the down payment, and is estimated by Yale economist Bill Nordhaus to cost the economy up to 1.6 trillion dollars in the long term. These costs are in excess of even the most pessimistic estimates of the cost of complying with the Kyoto protocol, put forth by the American Petroleum Institute. They are vastly in excess of more sound studies, which take into account technological innovation and the side benefits of energy conservation,.
The large expenditure for the Iraq war is doubly ironic in light of the flimsy evidence invoked to justify it. "Junk reasoning" is evidently OK when it comes to drumming up support for a war, but when it comes to fighting global warming the Bush Administration sets unrealistic and ever-increasing hurdles for scientific evidence to surmount before any mandatory action is deemed to be warranted. It would be nice if the administration applied the same exacting standards to their case for war. The vaunted link to Al Quaeda is acknowledged to be a tissue of lies. A supposed meeting between Iraqi agents and Al Quaeda reprentatives in Czechoslovakia turned out to be bogus, and a supposed Al Quaeda agent found visiting Iraq turned out to be an enemy of Al Quaeda who was in Baghdad only to get an artificial leg. In the search for banned Iraqi weapons, UN inspectors have referred to intelligence provided to them by the US as "junk." If Iraq still has banned weapons in hiding, the US certainly shows no signs of having evidence. An expanded weapons inspecton program would have been a much cheaper, safer and more diplomatically palatable way to turn up such weapons, if indeed they exist. Strategic planning for conduct for the war has suffered also from disregard for the facts. As reported in the Chicago Tribune, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was told by Turkish Foreign Minister Raser Yakis that Turkey could not support a military strike against Iraq. Nonetheless, Wolfowitz publically declared "Turkey's support is assured." Of course, it wasn't, and the war materiel waiting to offload at Turkey must now face a long trip around and through the Suez canal before it can be brought into play. The supposition that Iraqi troops would surrender en masse was based in part on intelligence from an Iraqi opposition leader, who has since turned out to be a con man, and disappeared from the scene. Powell's briefing to the U.N. was based in part on a British report that was touted as "high level intelligence." It was not; in fact it was cribbed from an outdated US PhD thesis, spelling errors and all, but with all the caveats and limitations edited out. Powell also introduced a document which purported to show an Iraqi attempt to purchase uranium from Nigeria; it turned out later to be a crude and childish forgery, which the CIA should easily have been able to detect. The chain of command, and the source of its advice, is littered with conflict of interest and corruption. Vice President Cheney's old company Halliburton is in line for sweetheart deals for the postwar reconstructio of Iraq. Arch-Hawk Richard Perle was recently forced to resign as head of an influential defense advisory panel on account of his business interests in the Middle East which stand to profit from war, and his contacts with arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi, to say nothing with his contracts with telecommunications giant Global Crossing. This was brought to light in a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersch. Perle's response was to call Hersch a terrorist. Sorry, Seymour -- no free speech allowed. Did you think you were living in America?
This week, continuing revelation of the extent of the deception in Bush's cheerleading for the war, the Administration finally admitted that the claim that Iraq had tried to purchase Uranium ore from Niger were based on bogus intelligence. Bush isn't owning up, but there's in fact ample evidence that the intelligence was known all along to be bogus, even as it was being incorporated in Bush's state of the union address and in Colin Powell's testimony to the UN. Greg Thielman, who resigned from the stratgeic and military affairs office of the State Department last September declared, "I believe the Bush Administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Joseph C. Wilson stated that he was sent to Niger before the war to check out claims about the attempted Uranium purchase. He reported back that the claims were probably fraudulent. The Administration ignored his investigation, and kept using the supposed purchase attempt in its justifications of the war. So, the costs are mounting up, and one wonders just exactly we were supposed to be getting in exchange for the billions we are spending, and why it was exactly so urgent to take on just this massive committment at just this time.
Bush accuses those who criticize the trumped-up WMD case of trying to "re-write history." Bush says that toppling Hussein was equally justified all along by humanitarian grounds regardless of the WMD case. This would come as a great surprise to those who heard the ceaseless doomsaying about the immediate threat posed by Iraq's supposed weapons, and the claims about the "pinpoint intelligence" which pointed to the existence of thousands of tons of chemical weapons, supposedly ready to deploy in "45 minutes" as Tony Blair claimed in a dossier later admitted to be based on uncorroborated intelligence. The top US Marine Commander in Iraq now says that the intelligence was "simply wrong." This will come as no surprise at all to Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors, who repeatedly tried to act on the supposedly "pinpoint" intelligence, only to find it worthless junk. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as much as admits that the WMD case was just settled on as a convenient pretext for war. "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Wolfowitz said in an interview with Vanity Fair. We are still waiting to understand exactly why we did go to war.
The idea that we went to war to save the Iraqi people from suffering is hard to credit, given that we passed up the opportunity to intervene in much more serious humanitarian crises. In the Congo, over a million civilians have perished in the wake of anarchy and civil war, and some semblance of order was kept only by a small and inadequate contingent of French troops (yes that's the same French that Bush accuses of spoiling his show in Iraq, the same ones that are held up to ridicule in America's right-wing press). Liberia also suffers, and the US is only now getting around to sending (grudgingly) a puny contingent of troops to alleviate the situation. While we're at it, shouldn't we be doing something about the mess in Nigeria? One is left with the highly uncomfortable impression that this war was a matter of looking "tough" (sure scared the North Korean's didn't it?), about doing something military just because it could be done, about winning support in the next Presidential election, and about distracting Americans from the dismal state of domestic affairs. Perhaps also there is some element of personal grudge here, and even of witless fixed ideas -- sticking to a pointless program just because it feels resolute to do so. Any way you look at it, it stinks like year-old fish, and makes one long for the relatively harmless pecadillos of the Clinton years.