Saturday, December 17, 2011

End Of Iraq War, Who Noticed?


"Mitt Romney tried to make a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry during a presidential debate. Well, who says the Republicans are rich snobs out of touch with the common man?" – Jay Leno

"A campaign staffer on the Newt Gingrich campaign was fired because he was making negative comments about Mormons. I thought, 'Wait a minute, isn't Newt in favor of multiple wives?'" –David Letterman

"Ron Paul is in favor of letting states legalize marijuana, prostitution, and cocaine. So even if he doesn't win, that's going to be one heck of an election night party." –Jay Leno


Well, Congress is finished for the year, and the War in Iraq is officially over; we got a two-fer... Now comes the articles trying to spin the arguments that going to Iraq was a good thing to do in the first place. Hey, Saddam Hussein was a bad man and we did a favor by taking him out. Ok, that explains our actions for one month of one year, what did we do during the other nine years and 11 months that was constructive? They cannot even provide consistent days with electricity, one of those infrastructure projects we paid Haliburton $1.8 billion for that they never begun...

The Center for American Progress is trying to determine the cost of the war: "Coalition deaths totaled 4,803, of which 4,484 (93 percent) were American. The number of Americans wounded was 32,200. At least 463 non-Iraqi contractors were killed. Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated to total between 103,674 and 113,265. The UNHCR says the war resulted in 1.24 million internally displaced persons and more than 1.6 million refugees.


The Congressional Research Service puts the dollar cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom at $806 billion.
The cost for veteran's benefits was $422 billion."

So far, nobody has begun to tally up the amount of money that went through charities, another one of the biggest money-making scams out there. Less than five cents out of every dollar donated actually goes to a project. Projects are often abandoned or made haphazardly so they don't last.... The lack of oversight makes it impossible to determine if any charitable project has helped, the honest, good ones are very few and far between.

Probably the most  dangerous thing we are leaving in Iraq, is Nuri al-Maliki in charge. He has a tendency towards autocracy, and could easily turn into a Saddam Mini-Me, even though he has said that he won't run again.  Who knows if he gave away the secret to bringing down our drone to his BFF's in Iran?

There weren't any major parties or ceremonies to celebrate the Americans leaving, many units just packed up and left in the dead of night, without telling their Iraqi partners. Leon Panetta did show up to help fold the last American flag. Really, it must have been an awkward situation, err, sorry that we killed so many of your people, hope you like your democracy... The main problem is that a democratic Iraq won't survive for long surrounded by so many dictatorships like Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia to destabilize it. The best hope is for the spirit of the Arab Spring bringing down those governments and entering Iraq to change it from within...

If you are a hawk like the GOP presidential candidates, except for Ron Paul, you can take comfort that we haven't pulled very far from Iraq, just to Kuwait and Bahrain, where we'll be able to re-invade at a moments notice. Who knows, perhaps we'll be able to manufacture a crisis before the primaries, if not the presidential election...

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