photo by nukeit1
Category: iraq
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Iraq War – 5 Years Later
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Billions over Baghdad
Illustration by John Blackford. By Peter van Agtmael/Polaris (desert), Konstantin Inozemtsev/Alamy (money).“Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam’s palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.”
“The New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. All told, the Fed would ship 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons.”
This article blew my mind.
[Full Article by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steel | Q&A with the authors]
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What does $456 billion buy? – The cost of the Iraq War
“According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.
At the upper range of those estimates, the $456 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world’s poor for five and a half years.”
UPDATE: I forgot to mention this is the source.
[also via Justin]
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Iraq War – 4 Years Later
photo by nukeit1I was in the streets four years ago with millions of others in opposition to this war of choice. Today, Iraq is in chaos and roughly 60000 – 65000 people are dead. Everyone knew this was going to be a giant mistake right from the beginning.
Excerpt from my blog four years ago today:
“The new US war on Iraq has begun: arguably the greatest moral tragedy of a generation, an unprecedented failure of diplomacy and international order, and a profound crime against the principles of democracy. Tens of thousands of people may lose their lives as a result of US attacks. Hardly any of them will be Americans; most of them will be civilians.” [source]
Fatherless children,
wait, across oceans and dunes,
for the war to die.
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Picking Up the Pieces – New York Times op/ed
photo by tj scenesI love reading the New York Times on a lazy sunday. I thought the following op/ed was so bang on that I had to re-blog it.
It was surreal how disconnected President Bush was the other night, both from Iraq’s horrifying reality and America’s anguish over this unnecessary, mismanaged and now unwinnable war. Indeed, most Americans seem far ahead of the president. They understand that what the country urgently needs is for Mr. Bush to chart a way out of Iraq that also limits the chaos that will be left behind.
The president’s disconnect goes far to explain the harshly critical reaction of Congress and the public to his plan to further bleed America’s overstretched forces by sending some 20,000 additional troops in an attempt to impose peace on Baghdad’s vengeful streets. He proposes to do that without any enforceable commitments from the Iraqi government that it will take the necessary political steps that are the only hope for tamping down a spiraling civil war.
There are no really satisfying answers in Iraq, since all of the remaining options are bad. Still, some are notably worse than others, and Mr. Bush has come up with possibly the worst. He would mortgage thousands more American lives and what remains of Washington’s credibility in the region to a destructively sectarian Shiite government that he seems unwilling or unable to influence or restrain.
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Pentagon Reveals News Correction Unit
Link to the terrifying article below at the BBC:
“The US defence department has set up a new unit to better promote its message across 24-hour rolling news outlets, and particularly on the internet.
The Pentagon said the move would boost its ability to counter “inaccurate” news stories and exploit new media.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said earlier this year the US was losing the propaganda war to its enemies.
On Monday, Vice-President Dick Cheney said insurgents had increased attacks in Iraq to sway the US mid-term polls.
The Bush administration does not believe the true picture of events in Iraq has been made public, the BBC’s Justin Webb in Washington says.
The administration is particularly concerned that insurgents in areas such as Iraq have been able to use the web to disseminate their message and give the impression they are more powerful than the US, our correspondent says.
‘Correcting messages’
The newly-established unit would use “new media” channels to push its message and “set the record straight”, Pentagon press secretary Eric Ruff said.
“We’re looking at being quicker to respond to breaking news,” he said.
“Being quicker to respond, frankly, to inaccurate statements.”
A Pentagon memo seen by the Associated Press news agency said the new unit would “develop messages” for the 24-hour news cycle and aim to “correct the record”.
The unit would reportedly monitor media such as weblogs and would also employ “surrogates”, or top politicians or lobbyists who could be interviewed on TV and radio shows.
Mr Russ said the move to set up the unit had not been prompted either by the eroding public support in the US for the Iraq war or the US mid-term elections next week.
‘War of ideas’
Mr Rumsfeld said earlier this year that he was concerned by the success of US enemies in “manipulating the media”.
“That’s the thing that keeps me up at night,” Mr Rumsfeld said.
On Monday, US Vice President Dick Cheney also made reference to the use of media, suggesting insurgents had increased their attacks and were checking the internet to keep track of American public opinion.
“It’s my belief that they’re very sensitive of the fact that we’ve got an election scheduled and they can get on the websites like anybody else,” Mr Cheney told Fox News.
“There isn’t anything that’s on the internet that’s not accessible to them. They’re on it all the time. They’re very sophisticated users of it.”
Mr Cheney’s comments came as American forces suffered one of the highest death tolls in October – more than 100 troops killed – since the war began in 2003.
President Bush has said recently that terror groups were trying to influence public opinion in the US, describing their efforts as the “war of ideas”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6100906.stm
Welcome to 1984.