Re: Cost of Iraq war and occupation

[Mike Ballard <swillsqueal@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The wealth the proles produce, tranlated into money is
going down the golden pipes, the plumbing of their
Empire.  But then, that's the political-economy of
capitalism.

For the works!

Mike B)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every
rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft
from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are
cold and are not clothed."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower
April 16, 1953

http://www.costofwar.com/





--- k hanly <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  Even if it does cost the US taxpayer a bundle, the
> windfall profits of a
> privatised oil industry going to the willing Bush
> buddies and the crony
> capitalists capturing of rebuilding contracts is
> surely worth it even if one
> adds the life values of a few US soldiers martyred
> to liberate Iraq
>
> Cheers, Ken Hanly
>
> Analysis: Soaring costs of 'rescuing' Iraq
> By Martin Sieff
> UPI Senior News Analyst
> Published 7/31/2003 10:49 AM
>
>
> (This is the first installment of United Press
> International's seven-part
> series on the U.S. presence in Iraq.)
>
>
> WASHINGTON, July 31 (UPI) -- The liberation of Iraq
> was to have been the war
> that paid for itself in spades, and gave U.S.
> corporations the inside track
> on the greatest energy bonanza of the 21st century.
> Instead, it has become a
> fiscal nightmare, a monetary Vietnam that already
> accounts for around 15
> percent of the U.S. annual budget deficit, a figure
> likely to only grow
> remorselessly into the unforeseeable future.
>
> The unforeseen cost of the war is already attracting
> powerful and
> influential critics, most worryingly to U.S.
> President George W. Bush, from
> within the GOP itself.
>
> On July 26, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of
> Indiana, chairman of the Senate
> Foreign Relations Committee, told National Public
> Radio that rebuilding Iraq
> is certain to cost U.S. taxpayers tens of billions
> of dollars over the next
> few years. He estimated the rebuilding costs alone
> at $30 billion.
>
> "But they do not wish to discuss that," he said.
>
> In financial terms, it should have been a sure
> thing. The Energy Information
> Administration records that Iraq is believed to have
> the second-largest
> reserves of high quality, easily accessible oil in
> the world: more than 112
> billion barrels.
>
> In the run up to this year's Iraq war, conferences
> and studies commissioned
> by hawkish conservative think tanks in Washington
> debated and prepared
> models for privatization of the Iraqi oil industry
> with, of course, major
> U.S. participation.
>
> A Heritage Foundation study by Ariel Cohen and
> Gerald O'Driscoll argued,
> "The Bush administration should provide leadership
> and guidance for the
> future Iraqi government ... (including) a massive,
> orderly and transparent
> privatization of state-owned enterprises, especially
> the restructuring and
> privatization of the oil sector."
>
> Commented John B. Judis in The New Republic Jan. 20,
> "The study has been
> well-received by administration neo-conservatives."
>
> And according to reports by Jamie Dettmer in Insight
> magazine and Judis in
> The New Republic, Eliott Abrams, now senior director
> for Near East and North
> African Affairs on the National Security Council,
> even authored a proposal
> in December calling for U.S. rather than U.N.
> management of Iraq's oil
> fields after U.S. conquest (or liberation) and
> occupation.
>
> Neo-conservative pundits with equal faith and fervor
> argued that Iraqi oil
> revenues would finance the country's own
> reconstruction after the war and
> that they could even be used to offset some U.S.
> military operating costs,
> surely a cheap price to pay for liberating the Iraqi
> people from the
> terrible yoke of President Saddam Hussein?
>
> But it hasn't worked out that way.
>
> The cost of the war itself exceed previous public
> projections from the
> office of the Secretary of Defense. At an April 16
> news conference, Pentagon
> comptroller Dov Zakheim acknowledged that the cost
> of the war to that point
> came to $10 billion-$12 billion. But the cost of
> returning troops to base
> would be another $5 billion-$7 billion, plus another
> $9 billion for the
> 3-1/2 weeks of combat operations, bringing the total
> cost at that point to
> between $24 billion-$28 billion.
>
> Since then, the continued cost of occupying Iraq and
> of the continued
> pacification and counter-guerrilla operations
> mounted there has been widely
> estimated at around $1 billion a week.
>
> Combining these two figures -- the Pentagon's own
> admitted costs of the war
> and the generally accepted cost of occupation
> operations, the costofwar.com
> Web site has estimated the cost of the war for the
> fiscal year after it took
> place at $76 billion.
>
> Costofwar.com also notes interest rates on the
> $1-billion-a-week occupation
> costs will make them $1.5 billion a week, or $78
> billion per year. And even
> that figure may prove optimistic, as it assumes
> larger numbers of U.S.
> troops will not be required and the current levels
> of violence against U.S.
> forces will not escalate either.
>
> The federal budget deficit for the coming year has
> been projected by the
> Bush administration's own Office for the Management
> of the Budget at $455
> billion: the largest in history. That means the Iraq
> war and its
> consequences alone will comprise 15.5 percent of the
> annual federal deficit
> at a time when it is larger, and rising faster, than
> ever before. Far from
> being a windfall to the U.S. economy, the Iraq war
> has already proven itself
> to be a ball and chain around the economy's neck.
>
> What happened to the vast oil production bonanza
> that was going to flow from
> Iraq? It hasn't happened and quite possibly never
> will. No one doubts the
> oil is there. But what the war planners and energy
> strategists never
> factored into their considerations was that, far
> from welcoming the U.S.
> Army and Marines as their liberators, the Iraqis --
> Sunni and Shiite
> alike -- might resent any continued U.S. military
> occupation and very
> quickly make it too hot to handle, which is exactly
> what has happened.
>
> The Pentagon hawks and their favorite energy
> strategists also turned out to
> have no strategy for rebuilding Iraq or maintaining
> security in the oil
> fields and pipelines running from them.
>
> First, they assumed an almost bloodless march to
> Baghdad instead of three
> weeks of high-speed and utterly successful, but
> still heavy, fighting.
> Collateral damage to oil facilities was considerably
> greater than
> anticipated.
>
> Second, and far more important, the grand strategy,
> insofar as there was
> one, anticipated an orderly takeover of occupation
> duties by an undersized
> U.S. military force that could rapidly be half
> evacuated. This plan ignored
> the warnings of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric
> Shinseki that hundreds of
> thousands of U.S. troops would be needed to ensure
> security in Iraq,
> including the security necessary to rebuild and
> operate the country's oil
> industry.
>
> Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz even hung
> Shinseki out to dry
> publicly for making this estimate. But since then he
> has had to swallow
> crow.
>
> Wolfowitz and even his gung-ho boss, Defense
> Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have
> been forced to acknowledge that at least 200,000
> U.S. troops, or more than a
> quarter of the standing strength of the U.S. Army,
> will be needed to occupy
> Iraq for the foreseeable future. And that kind of
> presence costs money:
> currently $1 billion a week.
>
> So far, no significant amounts of Iraqi oil have
> been produced for world
> markets since the war ended. Therefore Iraqi oil
> exports, which were running
> at 2.6 million to 2.8 million barrels per day before
> the war began in March,
> have now further dropped.
>
> The complete failure of two successive U.S.
> administrators in Baghdad to
> restore security, order and basic services to Iraq
> is a major reason why
> this has not happened.
>
> The administration, indeed, has been unable to even
> recruit any significant
> number of volunteers from conservative think tanks
> or the federal government
> to volunteer to work in Iraq for the next year or
> two, so the occupation
> administration there remains seriously undermanned.
>
> But there is a second reason that is in large part a
> consequence of the
> first -- U.S. planners never anticipated the rapid
> emergence of nationwide
> guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation, which is
> already costing up to
> one U.S. soldier killed per day. And as part of this
> guerrilla war, sabotage
> operations against oil pipelines are already
> widespread.
>
> Even with 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, they are
> spread far too thinly to
> aggressively fight the guerrilla war, lock down
> Iraq's borders with Iran and
> Syria and protect the oil facilities and pipelines
> at the same time.
> Furthermore, the troops currently deployed are not
> trained in police
> tactics.
>
> Pentagon officers speaking on condition of anonymity
> to United Press
> International have said at least twice the current
> manpower -- 300,000 U.S.
> or allied troops -- may be necessary to do this.
>
> In the meantime, the supposed "macro-economic"
> benefit of "liberating" Iraqi
> oil for the world market not only has not happened,
> precisely the opposite
> has occurred. Iraq is now in far-worse position to
> export either crude or
> refined oil to the world markets. As a result, the
> continuing effect of the
> war has been to strengthen the market position of
> the three leading global
> producers, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran, while
> keeping global energy prices
> relatively high and thereby adding a further burden
> to the U.S. annual
> balance of trade deficit, already by far the largest
> of any country in world
> history.
>
> And even if Iraqi oil finally starts to flow under
> optimum conditions, the
> total amount of revenue realistically projected from
> it would do no more
> than balance the already horrendous costs of the
> U.S. occupation.
>
> John Cassidy made the relevant calculations in the
> July 14 issue of The New
> Yorker. He wrote: "Assuming that oil prices hover
> around twenty-five dollars
> a barrel, which is in the middle of OPEC's target
> range (twenty-two to
> twenty-eight dollars a barrel), a resurgent Iraqi
> oil industry producing six
> million barrels of oil a day for export would
> generate about fifty-five
> billion dollars a year in revenues."
>
> But the cost to the United States of occupying Iraq
> is already running at
> between $52 billion to $78 billion a year on the
> U.S. government's own
> projections. And even if none of that $55 billion
> went to offset the costs
> of U.S. occupation, divided among the 30 million
> people of Iraq, it comes
> to, as Cassidy wrote "about five dollars per person
> per day -- enough to
> place Iraq above the World Bank's global poverty
> line of two dollars a day,
> but not by very much."
>
> This is hardly a region-transforming bonanza.
>
> Yet so confident were Office of the Secretary of
> Defense planners and their
> neo-conservative allies of the coming oil bonanza
> from Iraq that they openly
> advocated using it, as Judis wrote in The New
> Republic "to remake the Middle
> East in our democratic, capitalist image by
> leveraging Iraqi oil production
> to undermine Saudi dominance in the region and,
> perhaps, to destroy OPEC
> itself."
>
> Instead, the escalating woes of Iraq and the soaring
> costs of the war look
> likely to boost the Organization of Petroleum
> Exporting Countries and, by
> imposing huge additional budgetary strains on the
> United States at the worst
> possible time, weaken democracy and capitalism back
> in the United States
> itself.


=====
*****************************************************************
"The sheep feels best, safest, and happiest in the flock,
where it has nothing else to do but graze, grow wool,
and give birth to lambs.  Once the new office workers
had reached that stage, when their intellectual capacity
and their ambition had become like those of sheep in a
flock, that was when they had begun to be useful
and reliable pillars of the Company they worked for
and which paid them their salary."

from B. Traven's TROZAS

http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com