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$3 trillion Iraq War Cost May Be Too Low

Published on Monday, April 07, 2008.

Source: The Guardian - Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes

Notwithstanding President Bush’s response, our original estimate of the cost of the Iraq war was too conservative: in reality, it will be much higher
President Bush has tried to give the impression that the $3 trillion dollar estimate of the total cost of the war that we provide in our new book may be exaggerated.

We believe that it is, in fact, conservative. Even the president would have to admit that the $50 to $60 billion estimate given by the administration before the war was wildly off the mark; there is little reason to have confidence in their arithmetic. They admit to a cost so far of $600 billion.

Our numbers differ from theirs for three reasons: first, we are estimating the total cost of the war, under alternative conservative scenarios, derived from the defence department and congressional budget office. We are not looking at McCain’s 100-year scenario - we assume that we are there, in diminished strength, only through to 2017. But neither are we looking at a scenario that sees our troops pulled out within six months. With operational spending going on at $12 billion a month, and with every year costing more than the last, it is easy to come to a total operational cost that is double the $600 billon already spent.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/view.asp?ID=6157

The comments of Dr George Hunsinger of Princeton University, an ordained Presbyterian minister, are typical of those who believe the US popular media have distorted Wright’s remarks.

“I think we are looking at some basic questions of fairness,” he told Inter Press Service. “Is it really fair to take a minister’s remarks, no matter how provocative or ill-advised, out of context and to broadcast them incessantly, as if they were the only thing that minister ever said or believed? What purposes are served by this sort of propaganda?”

Hunsinger also raised the issue of faulting Obama for remarks made by Wright. “Is it really fair to slime a candidate with the defamation of guilt by association? Does anyone really believe that tactics like this belong in a well-functioning democracy? What kind of media succumbs to these tactics?”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JD04Aa03.html

KARACHI - Like a voice from the grave, legendary Afghan mujahideen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani has emerged from years of silence to boldly launch the Taliban-led spring offensive in Afghanistan, at the same time burying any doubts of a split between his coalition of resistance groups and Mullah Omar’s Taliban.

In a video message released last week and which is only now coming into wider circulation, Haqqani, speaking in his trademark low-pitched voice and with his hair dyed red with henna, called on the people of Afghanistan “to stand up against the US-led forces in Afghanistan and drive them out”.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JD04Df02.html