Devastation on the ground and largely held Iraqi opinion contradicts claims by U.S. officials that the situation in Iraq has improved towards the fifth anniversary of the invasion Mar. 20. U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, during a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday declared the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a "successful endeavour".

18th March 08 - Dahr Jamail, IPS News

According to the group Just Foreign Policy, more than a million Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and occupation, now entering its sixth year. A survey by British polling agency ORB estimates the number of dead at more than 1.2 million.

Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz recently published a book with co-author Linda Bilmes of Harvard University titled 'The Three Trillion Dollar War', a figure it considers a "conservative estimate" of the long-range price tag of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The authors say the Bush administration has repeatedly "low-balled" the cost of the war, and has kept a set of records hidden from the U.S. public.

According to the U.S. Department of Defence, close to 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The number of British casualties is 175.

"The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain," journalist Patrick Cockburn of London's Independent Newspaper wrote Mar. 17. "It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided, and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish."

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than four million Iraqis are displaced from their homes, with roughly half of them outside of the country.

The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that one in every four residents of Baghdad, a city of six million, is displaced from home.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a report Mar. 17 that millions are still deprived of clean water and medical care.

Iraq's infrastructure is worse on every measurable level compared to Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and including 12 years of the harshest economic sanctions in history. During those sanctions more than a million Iraqis died from malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care.

The international aid group Oxfam International released a report last July that found that four million Iraqis were in need of emergency assistance. It found a 9 percent increase in childhood malnutrition, and that 70 percent of Iraqis lacked access to safe drinking water.

The average home in Iraq, even in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq that has been held up by the Bush administration as an example of success, has on average less than five hours of electricity a day.

Oil exports, from which Iraq has obtained over 80 percent of its income, have not for a single day of the occupation matched pre-war levels.

Unemployment, already 32 percent before the invasion, has vacillated during the occupation between 40-70 percent, according to the Iraqi government.

With more than a million dead, more than four million displaced, and another four million in need of emergency aid, a third of Iraqis are displaced, in need of emergency aid -- or dead.

All this Cheney calls a "successful endeavour".

Soon after he said that, a suicide bomber killed at least 32 and wounded 51 near a mosque in the holy Shia city Kerbala, south of Baghdad. Bombings in Baghdad near the Green Zone just after Cheney arrived killed another four, and wounded 13.

Baghdad has become the most dangerous city in the world, largely as a result of a U.S. policy of pitting various Iraqi ethnic and sectarian groups against one another. Today Baghdad is a city of walled-off Sunni and Shia ghettoes, divided by concrete walls erected by the U.S. military.

These areas even fly their own flags; Sunni areas fly the old Iraqi flag, Shias use the new version, and the Kurds have their own flag.

Ethnic and sectarian cleansing strategies, backed by occupation forces, have virtually eliminated all mixed areas of Baghdad.

Republican Party presidential candidate John McCain, also in Iraq, met with Iraqi leaders as part of a Senate Armed Services Committee fact-finding mission. He, like Cheney, said he would support the Iraqi government and maintain a long-term military commitment in Iraq.

"The surge is working," McCain told reporters, referring to the troop build-up in Baghdad.

With "enduring" U.S. military bases established in Iraq, and an embassy in Baghdad the size of the Vatican City, there appears to be no end in sight for the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

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Link to report by the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross): Iraq: no let-up in the humanitarian crisis (14th March 2008)

Iraq: Untold millions

Ian Gibson and William Mathew, The Guardian (UK), 17th March 08

We have been too slow to demand answers about the amount of money being poured into the military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The true financial cost of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq is finally on the media's agenda for the first time since the occupations began. This follows the dramatic March report (pdf) of the Commons defence committee showing that total expenditures since 2001 had risen to almost £10bn - with a likely acceleration of outlays in the years ahead. Joseph Stiglitz claims in his recent book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, that Iraq alone will probably, in the end, cost Britain "over £20 billion". In terms of human tragedy, everyone is aware of the obvious human costs - in Iraq, the 175 British troops, 3,800-plus US troops, and hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, as well as the million-plus people displaced since the 2003 invasion; in Afghanistan, as of February 20, 89 British and 482 US service personnel dead, along with many thousands of Afghans. All of this, quite properly, has been very much in the public eye. There has, by contrast, been a total absence of sustained discussion of monetary costs.

Parliamentary near-silence on the matter is in stark contrast to proceedings in the 1920s, when David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Andrew Bonar Law - to name but three - all contributed to extended and highly informed debates on the financial cost of British military involvement in Iraq. Up until this year, the only real chance to discuss the issue has come with the publication of the defence spring estimates - that is, after the money has been committed. In all other spending departments, estimates are delivered in the July of the financial year, enabling parliamentary reviews to take place in advance of expenditure. This is not the only way in which the government has been standing in the way of debate. Members' questions, in so far as they occur, are often brushed aside by exaggerated cautions concerning national security. The MoD also refuses to give breakdowns for capital-expenditure costs. Most problematic of all, money for the wars comes mainly from a Treasury special reserve fund, the aggregate figures here being slipped into the chancellor's budget and pre-budget reports. Up to the budget of 2007, £7.4bn had been allocated in half-yearly increments, locked away inside hold-call categories of expenditure, and never the subject of parliamentary discussion.

How do the figures now stand? Total costs (a combination of "operational" and "capital" expenditures) for both theatres have risen to £9.9bn: a remarkable 94% increase on 2006-07. Over the last two years there has been close to a trebling of expenditures. The principal factor in this huge increase has been the bloody operations in Helmand ("shots", contra John Reid, having been "fired"). Comparing the latest estimate for the country as a whole with that for three years earlier, the increase has been, stunningly, 25-fold. Capital expenditures over the last year alone have gone up by 207%. Iraq, by comparison, had been showing a levelling off between 2004-05 and 2006-07. This year, however, the estimated figure has rocketed up, by 72%: from £956m to £1,648m - by far the steepest annual rise since the war began, and, extraordinarily, occurring at a time of withdrawal from active operations in Basra. The defence select committee notes this extreme oddity, but describes it only as "surprising". One has to wonder, especially in the light of Admiral William Fallon's resignation on March 11 as chief of US forces in the Middle East, if the UK is holding on for anti-Shia operations in the event of a US or Israeli strike on Iran.

It is important to realise, of course, that we are dealing here with minimum estimates, covering only direct military outlays and excluding what the leading UK expert on war costing, Keith Hartley, enumerates as "possible higher oil prices, impacts on such sectors as the airline industry, foreign tourism and share prices, a loss of investor confidence, as well as a possible recession in the world economy". There are also "opportunity costs" - other government (including MoD) objectives being abandoned or compromised by the prioritising of war expenditures. The notional list here is endless. To cite just one example, a brand new state-of-the-art hospital in Birmingham would cost a probable £545m. At a time of acute fiscal stringency, as evidenced by the March 12 budget, we are struggling to provide older people with adequate pensions, economising on flood relief systems, and denying public-sector workers properly indexed pay rises. It is time, therefore, for a vital debate - especially when the foreign secretary is reasserting the case for Blairite liberal interventionism; when there is developing an open-ended, ad infinitum commitment to a highly losable war in Afghanistan; and when all confident bets on an imminent "drawdown" to the disasters in Iraq have had to be called off.

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The Wages of Peace

Robert Pollin & Heidi Garrett-Peltier, The Nation, 13th March 08 

There is no longer any doubt that the Iraq War is a moral and strategic disaster for the United States. But what has not yet been fully recognized is that it has also been an economic disaster. To date, the government has spent more than $522 billion on the war, with another $70 billion already allocated for 2008.

With just the amount of the Iraq budget of 2007, $138 billion, the government could instead have provided Medicaid-level health insurance for all 45 million Americans who are uninsured. What's more, we could have added 30,000 elementary and secondary schoolteachers and built 400 schools in which they could teach. And we could have provided basic home weatherization for about 1.6 million existing homes, reducing energy consumption in these homes by 30 percent.

But the economic consequences of Iraq run even deeper than the squandered opportunities for vital public investments. Spending on Iraq is also a job killer. Every $1 billion spent on a combination of education, healthcare, energy conservation and infrastructure investments creates between 50 and 100 percent more jobs than the same money going to Iraq. Taking the 2007 Iraq budget of $138 billion, this means that upward of 1 million jobs were lost because the Bush Administration chose the Iraq sinkhole over public investment... 

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