The cost of nation building - a hell of a price to pay

When Georgi W. Bush ran for prezident, he said, over and over, again, contra Al Gore, that he would refuse to engage in nation building. Al Gore, he implied, was that terrible person who thought the United States should extend its influence in whatever way possible to make all the countries in the world democracies.

Georgi said that was wrong, and he wasn't going to do it. Georgi wasn't going to send troops into harms way just to install democracy in some weird foreign country which he had never visited and knew nothing about (which would include almost every country in the world).

Reminds me of our last election, where the Repugnicans tried to put Obama down by saying he had no foreign policy experience. As if McCain did. As if getting shot down and being locked away in a jungle prison camp constituted foreign policy experience. And then, there's always Ms. Alaska, the doofus ex-beauty queen who just knew Russia was somewhere close by and so what if she confused a cloud with the former USSR? Her foreign policy experience was, and still is, about the size of a thimble.


So what did Georgi do when he got into office? He manufactured a war with Iraq so he could do some nation building. Actually, nation building was secondary to his main purpose of securing the Iraqi oil fields for his buddies in the oil industry, but he couldn't tell the truth to the American people 'cause they'd have had him for lunch.

So, he made up stuff: about WMDs; about nuclear possibilities and provoclivities; about terrible Islamic dictators; about how Iraq was involved in 9/11; about how ol' Saddam was a terrible threat to the U.S. of A.

He lied - over and over again! And then when those particular lies wouldn't work anymore, he decided to lie again and say that the war in Iraq was to bring democracy to those poor, backward people in that poor, blighted land. He decided nation building wasn't so bad after all. And we did need the oil. Of which Iraq has beaucoup barrels!


Now, five and a half years later, we're trying to get out of the mess. And it's an incredible mess! We don't seem to be able to do a lot about it, except build a massive embassy where hundreds of people pretend to work at unnecessary jobs behind a multitude of defenses to protect them from the people of the land for whom this massive paean to stupidity is a huge insult!

Jim Hightower, in his latest newsletter, notes that at the end of June, the U.S. military honcho in Iraq turned "military authority over to the government of Prime Minister Nuri-al-Maliki." That was followed by "a day of national celebration."

The Americans are leaving! The Americans are leaving!

Except, as Hightower points out, the Americans aren't leaving:

"First, only about 30,000 of America's soldiers in Iraq have actually left, and the Pentagon says it plans to keep 50,000 troops stationed there for years to come.

"Then there's the little matter of being stuck with the bill. Rather than paying for the war as we went, George W. and Congress put the whole thing on the nation's credit card."

Hightower references "two top economic analysts," Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, who have concluded that this damn war has cost us a trillion dollars and by the time everything is added up ("interest payments on the war debt, replenishment of military equipment, and long-term care for the 80,000 troops who've been wounded or traumatized ... the bill comes to some $3 trillion)"!

"We won't," warns Hightower, "be 'through' with Iraq for generations to come."


But that's not the whole picture, either. Afghanistan is still a millstone around our neck. "Obama and Congress have committed about $24 billion this year to the carnage in that harsh land."

Hightower, who also noted that 4,300 American troops who died in Iraq, says:

"It's a hell of a price to pay for...well, for what, exactly?"


For what? Yeah, for what? For NOTHING! Every dollar wasted on stupid and unnecessary and unwinnable wars is a dollar that is unavailable for health care, education, rebuilding our infrastructure, renewable energy sources, fighting global warming, and all those things needed to provide social security for our citizens.

Can you imagine what we could have done with $3 trillion dollars over the past five and half years?

Where were all the so-called "tea-baggers" and other nogoodnik, moronic protestors when Bush/Cheney and gang rode the country into the ground for the sole purpose of making the rich richer?

But we're still nation building - in Afghanistan - an impossible task! There is No way we can win in Afghanistan. None! Every dollar we spend there is the same as if we tossed it into a fire-breathing volcano.

Or, again, as Jim Hightower put it, "It's a hell of a price to pay for ... well, for what, exactly?"


For more from Mr. Hightower, point your browser here.