Matthew Rothschild: Iraq War at 5

[marmar]

from The Progressive:



Iraq War at 5
By Matthew Rothschild, March 17, 2008



The dreadful landmark is upon us.

Bush’s Iraq War is now five years old.

He and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell dragged us into it on a leash of lies. One of those duplicitous links was acknowledged by the Pentagon last week when it came out with a report showing no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The other whopper was about those elusive weapons of mass destruction.

As Barack Obama rightly says, “This is a war that should never haven been authorized and never have been waged.”

And the costs of this war have been astronomical, no matter what calculator you use.

On the most important, human side, the results have been hideous. We’ve lost 4,000 soldiers and 30,000 more have been wounded, many of them grievously. Iraqi civilians have suffered enormously, with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and millions turned into refugees.

Then there’s the financial cost.

We’re wasting $3 billion a week on this fiasco. And when all is said and done, we’ll have spent upwards of $2 trillion—enough to pay for universal health care for 12 years.

And the kicker is, the war hasn’t made us any safer. It’s made us more imperiled, serving as a recruiting call for Al Qaeda and a training ground using live ammunition and live targets: our soldiers.

Enough already.

This is a disaster times five. We cannot allow it to reach a sixth.


http://www.progressive.org/mag_wx031708