Never Their Children-A Short Video Essay About Iraq

Here is a short video essay called "Never Their Children" about who fights, and more importantly, who doesn't, in Iraq.

Question to Ask the GOP: How Much Longer Will You Keep American Troops in Iraq?

That is the question that the media never seems to get around asking Republican Senators and Representatives. They are allowed to get up and denounce Democrats for wanting a time limit to our involvement. They are allowed to claim that Democrats are going to put "a bullet in the heart of our troops," as Senator Kay Hutchinson did on Tuesday, February 26, 2008. Yet, they never have to state how long they would keep spending American lives and money in Iraq.

We hear such trite sayings as "We will stand down as the Iraqis stand up." We are told that the Democrats should allow General Petraeus to decide how long troops should stay in Iraq. But Republicans never say how long they are willing to keep American troops in Iraq.

While GOP officeholders are not willing to say, the Pentagon is willing to tell us. The figure they are using is that 140,000 troops will be in Iraq after the troops that make up the so-called "surge" are withdrawn. If you are keeping score, that is 8,000 more troops than were in Iraq when the "surge" began.

The cost to the United States for the war in Iraq is getting close to half a trillion dollars, and we are spending money at about a clip of about 12.5 billion a month. Of course, that is not what we were told at the beginning of Bubble-Boy's adventure. Then we were told that the war would cost around 50-60 billion. When Larry Summers, the President's Economic Advisor, said that the cost could reach 200 billion, his estimate was called "baloney" by Donald Rumsfeld.

So here we are, five years after the invasion of Iraq, over 4,000 American dead, thousands wounded, and billions spent. Yet, the media continues to act as if the burden of proof is on the opponents of the war and not on the supporters of the war.

Iraq War Cost Keeps Going Up and Up

There is a new report out by the Congressional Budget Office that shows that the cost of the Iraq War rose sharply in 2007. This is from the Reuters article:
War funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008, the nonpartisan office wrote.

The cost of this war is not being borne by Americans in the form of tax increases or cutbacks in government spending. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress have ruled out tax increases. It is being financed by borrowing and passing the cost on to future generations of taxpayers. When George W. Bush took office, the country was running a surplus, now it is running a deficit projected this year to reach 250 billion dollars.

Meanswhile the Federal Debt has gone from around four trillion dollars to over 9 trillion dollars. A lot of this is owned by foreign entities which are controlled by foreign governments, like the Chinese.

None of this seems to worry "Bubble-Boy" and his Republican allies since they think that they won't pay any political price for supporting these idiotic policies. Let's try to disabuse them of this notion in November.

Media Starts Talking About Cost of War

McClatchy News Bureau in Washington has a story out today about how the war is soon going to cost over 500 billion. According to the story this is about 10 times what Bubble-Boy and his band of idiots predicated this war would cost when he began it. In fact, again according to the article, he got rid of an economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsay, after Lindsay said that the war would cost around 200 billion.

What Democrats should start pointing out to people is that Bush and his radical right-wing followers would never spend that much money to help Americans. They would never spend it for health care, or for education, or to fight poverty, or for mass transit so we aren't dependent on foreign oil, no, not for things that help Americans. But they will gladly spend money to fight a a war to supposedly help the Iraqis build a democratic government.

Three thousand lives, 500 billion dollars, and no end in sight. If you know any Bush supporters, ask them if this war has been worth it.