Fog of Truth — ‘Bugsplat’
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As the new year grinds on, politics has taken the edge off the nearly unnoticed pullout of US troops from Iraq, ending a segment in one of the most-horrible of episodes.
And the most lied about military adventure in US history.
“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
– US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, June 5, 2008
Despite the obvious, none of George Jr.’s entourage has ever even been threatened with criminal prosecution.
(Illustration found here).
In a new view of the Iraqi horror is the word, “bugsplat:” One definition is a software for scanning your computer for registry errors; another is the lack of humanity in warfare.
The US military’s invasion was a nasty example of the latter.
In fact, ‘Bugsplat‘ was the name of a computer program in 2003 used to determine collateral damage inflicted by American bombs.
HaHaHaHa — bugsplat, anyone/anything squashed on the US windshield.
Robert Koehler took a look at this line of bullshit yesterday morning at the Baltimore Sun:
“But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians,” journalist Allan Nairn told Amy Goodman in a “Democracy Now!” interview last year.
“The Pentagon has a word for that, too,” he went on.
“They call it ‘bugsplat.’
In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid.
On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that 22 of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat — that is, more than 30 civilian deaths per raid.
Franks said, ‘Go ahead. We’re doing all 22.’”
And this is the foundation of our national security.
Koehler concludes:
Project Bugsplat is the name of every war, at least from the planners’ point of view.
A winnable war is waged from above, invisibly, with godlike impunity.
Such wars, especially in today’s political order, cannot be effectively opposed with acts of equally brutal counterforce; they can only be prolonged.
“Bugsplat” is a term of ultimate disrespect and indifference, and it begins with a state of mind.
The global Occupy movement, with its humane and nonviolent core certainty, is tipping the balance. Finally it comes down to this: Occupy consciousness.
Without such, death comes by indifference.
This indifference can be applied to the US MSM — news organizations who have turned its eyes and ears away from exposing a rot now fully grown within the American soul.
Watch and listen here to the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter’s emotional outrage at the Iraqi war — he expresses horror at his own country (the UK) for being involved with such a crime.
And despite the US supposedly being gone, the blood still flows – from Bloomberg on a new report from London-based Iraq Body Count:
“The rate of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by U.S.-led coalition forces has declined steadily from 2009, while the rate caused by Iraqi state forces has increased,” the group said in an e-mailed news release.
Recent trends point to a “persistent low-level conflict in Iraq that will continue to kill civilians at a similar rate for years to come,” Iraq Body Count said.
“Time will tell whether the withdrawal of U.S. forces will have an effect on casualty levels,” the group said.
The US media, however, has been most quiet about any bad vibes coming off a war that tore apart the world’s thin fabric and left a country in a position beyond misery – a verbal snapshot of one Iraqi woman seems to sum it up: “Today is better than tomorrow.”
And tomorrow is the Iowa caucuses where the war party starts its machine rolling — horror of ugly horrors, though Newt Gingrich whined and took a bugsplat: “No, I feel ‘Romney-boated.”
The dogs of war fight amongst themselves — bug splatting everybody.
Reality of the Reality
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(Illustration found here).
In reality, a picture is indeed worth a shitload of words.
One haunting face, that 4-year-old Iraqi kid — the above photo has been on Google Images for years, and has always caused me to hurt whenever I spotted it (used it a couple of times on blog posts to epitomize, or something like that, of a simple-impact of war-reality) and as a parent, always felt an intense, emotional near-freak-out in seeing a child’s innocence near-saturated by fear.
The little boy over her shoulder, held by the woman in black, appears still clueless.
She’s not.
The US is horribly shamed, only if by once having any shame.
America’s history ain’t pretty — from the get-go in using the term, “massacre,” in waging war against against the native population (near-genocide); slavery as a national economic institution; deliberately infecting sexually transmitted diseases, including syphilis and gonorrhea to some unfortunate citizens of Guatemala; and so forth…
And now one can add the current, though, long-time running, US near-destroying Iraq — though, in this particular case, the cost for everybody on the planet is near-about incomprehensible.
Since March 2003 and through December 2011, between 106,000 and nearly 114,000 Iraqi civilians have either directly/indirectly been killed (via Iraq Body Count), with some estimates much higher — in 2006, a survey was published online by British medical journal, The Lancet, which reported 655,000 Iraqis or more than 500 people a day (have been killed) since the U.S.-led invasion.
George Jr. dismissed the numbers: “I don’t consider it a credible report.”
Of course, a year later George Jr. would also deny the onset of the current financial chaos.
The number is Iraqi children killed, separate from the rest, is hard to pin down, there’s just no list somewhere — I tried Googling all kinds of ways, but no real substance, and a guess would be in the thousands or more.
Last July, UNICEF said in a report marking the “Day of the Iraqi Child,” 900 children were killed in violence between 2008 and 2010 and more than 3,200 wounded — children accounted for 8.1 percent of all casualties in attacks during that period.
Not much info, but no surprise — Tommy Franks blubbered at the outset, “We don’t do body counts,” and left it at that.
However, even before March 2003, Iraq children were dying in droves.
The sanctions imposed by the US-led UN in the early 1990s claimed half a million children under the age of 5 — in 1996, Lesley Stahl of CBS‘ 60 Minutes asked Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the UN, about this:
“We have heard that a half million children have died,” Stahl said.
“I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And — and you know, is the price worth it?”
Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”
Such US compassion.
And of the children of US peoples?
In 2008, the median age of US serviceman/woman was 28, though, almost 50 percent was between 22 and 30 — reportedly, the last GI killed in Iraq was a 23-year-old North Carolina boy.
These guys paid the local price.
Beyond the immoral, hard-to-grasp 4,484 US GIs killed, the more than 33,000 wounded, there’s the hardcase reality of a military that’s near busted — at least in its flesh and blood, the drones, of course, will continue to fly.
Due to Don Rumsfeld’s arrogant — “You go to war with the Army you have…,” and sorry about the inconvenience, war is war, “You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can (still) be blown up…” — bullshit, the US military got blind-sided/ass-wiped by Iraq.
And in turn, blind-sided/ass-wiped the planet.
Not everyone was blind — Iraq was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration – eight months before Sept. 11 for George Jr., who although handled cabinet meetings “like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people,” near-immediately after the WTC attack wanted to bomb IRAQ.
From a CBS interview with Richard Clarke, former top White House anti-terrorism advisor and directly after 9/11:
“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’
Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’
But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind.
There’s no connection.’
“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’
And in a very intimidating way.
I mean that we should come back with that answer.
We wrote a report.”
Rumsfeld appeared surrealistic during meetings, like a horror-outtake from Monty Python:
“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl.
“And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan.
We need to bomb Afghanistan.
And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq.
I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.
“I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we’ve looked at this issue for years.
For years we’ve looked and there’s just no connection.”
A little more than 18 months later, the US rolled into Iraq.
And out came a worn-down military machine with lots of burned-out cogs.
Due to the puzzlement of George Jr.’s crowd of incompetent people on what to do after the fall of Baghdad, the GI suffered, and suffered, dragging in the poor National Guard, 37,000 of which served in Iraq, where they were one-third more likely to be killed in combat than regular soldiers.
In Iraq, 140 Guardsmen were killed: A total of 94 Army National Guardsmen and no reservists were killed out of 58,209 U.S. deaths in Vietnam. (A reason the Guard was a ticket to safety in them days).
(Illustration found here).
And with current veterans — a reality figure of 800,000 — one in five — suffer from PTSD (although only 46 percent seek medical help), which might account for a higher-than norm suicide rate.
And the shit is so bad: “The four-legged, wet-nosed troops used to sniff out mines, track down enemy fighters and clear buildings are struggling with the mental strains of combat nearly as much as their human counterparts. By some estimates, more than 5 percent of the approximately 650 military dogs deployed by American combat forces are developing canine PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder].”
Dogs of an illegal and much-bungled war — a war which made the world a much-more dangerous place.
And Saturday morning, the last of US troops rumbled out of Iraq and into Kuwait in a 123-truck convey while a drone circled quietly overhead — the operative word, ‘quietly‘, no shock and awe here.
In its wake, a country shot to shit and back.
Iraq nowadays is a contradictory nightmare — despite economic growth at a China-like 9.6 per cent and about the same forecast for the next five years, Iraqi peoples get just 7.6 hours a day of electricity; only 30 per cent of homes are connected to sewerage; just 38 per cent of households rate availability of drinking water as “good” or “very good”; and one in eight Iraqis who dealt with a civil servant over the past year was obliged to pay a bribe; and this from Firas Naeem, a 37-year-old owner of a clothing store in central Baghdad’s busy Karrada Out shopping street: “…but anyone who is honest has to admit that life for ordinary people is still harder now than it was before (the invasion in) 2003.”
Another man-made horror.
Chris Floyd, who can be passionate, got so in a post on Friday concerning the Iraqi catastrophe:
This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin.
It is the only reality; there is no other.
And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly.
Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen.
It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.
Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children — the infants, the toddlers, the schoolkids — whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.
This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; there is no other reality.
These children — these thousands of children — are dead, and will always be dead, as a direct result of the unprovoked act of military aggression launched and sustained by the American power structure.
Killing these children, creating and maintaining the conditions that led to the slaughter of these children, was precisely what the armed forces of the United States were doing in Iraq.
Without the invasion, without the occupation, without the 1.5 million members of the American volunteer army who surrendered their moral agency to “just follow orders” and carry out their leaders’ agenda of aggression, those children would not have died — would not have been torn, eviscerated, shot, burned and destroyed.
This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; you cannot make it otherwise.
It has already happened; it always will have happened.
You cannot undo it.
One would also like to bring George Jr. and all his lackeys to justice — it’s obvious to anyone with walking around sense they’re war criminals.
No way, however.
Instead of the real culprits, President Obama is going balls-to-the-wall after Julian Assange via a sad US serviceman, Bradley Manning, whose first court appearance was on Friday.
Read about Manning’s inhumane trip here, and the secrecy bullshit here.
In reality, all to make an example: Other young soldiers thinking of telling the truth about America’s wars must by now have surely gotten the message: if you see something, don’t say something. Meanwhile, Manning couldn’t be faulted for wondering why he did not just take a cue from his commander-in-chief and kill some innocent foreigners like a good American boy. Instead of facing a lifetime in prison, he might have been up for a medal.
Reality ain’t fragile.
‘Just a cost of doing business’
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Opened with a big bang — ‘shock and awe’ — and closed with a deceitful shudder.
The US ended its military misadventure on Iraq yesterday awash in bullshit.
Leon Panetta has got to be one of the most disingenuous and hypocritical assholes this side of Newt Gingrich, claiming the Iraqi debacle was worth the price in blood and money because it set Iraq on a path to democracy.
“You will leave with great pride – lasting pride,” Mr Panetta told the troops.
“Secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to begin a new chapter in history.”
No wonder the US is disliked by so much of the planet.
(Illustration found here).
Worth it, Leon?
The UK’s The Guardian has a good overview this morning of the ‘worth’ in the Iraqi horror story:
- The US has lost 4,484 military personnel since 2003 in Iraq – the vast majority of the 4,802 coalition casualties. This year has seen casualties too – 54 people have been killed, although that is much lower than the 2007 peak of 904. (Reportedly, my state, California, seemed to carry a big burden — 388 of the state’s people were killed).
Thousands more have been wounded in Iraq – 32,200 at last count, 22,490 of them in the Army, followed by 8,622 US Marines.
- The war in Iraq has cost the US $823.2bn since 2003 – and in 2011 cost $49.3bn, only $4bn less than 2003 when the invasion happened.
- Civilians have suffered enormously in Iraq — the data above comes from Iraq Body Count, which monitors reported deaths and reckons up to 113,728 Iraqis have died.
Recently, IBC reported that at least 1,003 suicide bombings caused civilian casualties in Iraq from 2003 to 2010.
The Wikileaks data showed how many died, particularly in the violent sectarian aftermath of the war, with murders as the main cause.
That database recorded 109,032 deaths , 66,081 of them civilians, 23,984 insurgents and 15,196 Iraqi security forces.
The worst place for deaths was Baghdad, with 45,497.
And that’s just a quick look — a closer view makes for a grim read.
One of those is a small slice of the horror — the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha in Anbar Province.
From TruthOut:
“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, told investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq.
At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”
The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq.
Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad.
An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.
Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one Marine has been convicted.
But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand.
In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine.
And from the testimony of Major Gen Steve Johnson, then-commander of US forces in Anbar Province:
“There were other — this was November — so we had been at it since March.
And examples of many civilians being killed at a given time were precedent for that.
It happened all the time, not necessarily in the west all the time, but throughout the whole country.
…
But at that point in time, I felt that that was — had been, for whatever reason, part of that engagement and felt that it was just a cost of doing business on that particular engagement.”
Killing a guy in a wheelchair, and babies?
Cost of doing business…
Scream Into The Horror of The Night
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Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis.
This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld memorandum, Nov. 6, 2006
(Illustration found here).
In the annuals of world history there’s near-about no match for the horror of the US invasion of Iraq and all its far-flung ugly consequences.
Despite any rational reasoning beyond greed, George Jr.’s little party tipped the world into the hellish crevasse it now finds itself and murdered thousands of Iraqi innocents in the process — and despite the guffaws, a tribunal in Malaysia right-recently found George Jr. and his suck-buddy, Tony Blair, guilty of war crimes for their instigation of the slaughter: The Malaysian tribunal judges ruled that the decision to wage war against Iraq by the two former heads of government was a flagrant abuse of law and an act of aggression that led to large-scale massacres of the Iraqi people.
Why hasn’t the rest of the world jumped?
Nobel Peace Prize nominee, political scientist Michael Haas on just the noncompliance of rational, humane justice:
First, however, it is useful to recall that when the Afghan War began, General Tommy Franks ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions on October 17, 2001.
On November 13 he was countermanded by an executive order in the form of a military order from President George W. Bush regarding prisoners who were then being collected, though no specific mention was made of the Geneva Conventions.
When the first prisoners arrived at the Naval Base on January 11, 2002, the commanding general, Brigadier General Rick Baccus, ordered compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
His order was then rescinded on February 7 by another executive order signed by George W. Bush making specific reference to the inapplicability of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 but not the 1929 Geneva Convention.
On Guantanamo alone George Jr. and ‘The Dick‘ Cheney should be jailed with the keys thrown into the muddy Potomac River.
And so today, in fanfare and a shitload of lying bullshit, the US ended its “official” military presence in Iraq with a so-called flag-casing ceremony in Baghdad — US defence honcho Leon Panetta added his body weight in bullshit, too.
From Aljazeera English:
Nearly nine years after the start of the controversial invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and sparked years of violence, Panetta told Iraqis “Your children will have a better future”, and said the US and Iraq would have “a new relationship rooted in mutual interest and mutual respect”.
“We are not about turn our backs on all that has been sacrificed and accomplished in Iraq,” Panetta said.
“Iraq will be tested in the days ahead by terrorism, by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues … by the demands of democracy itself,” he said, while adding that the US would be a “committed friend and … partner” to the country.
General Lloyd Austin, the commander of US forces in Iraq, said that the country would be “a source of stability and inspiration in the region”.
And the locals?
“If the Americans have achieved anything, they have achieved it to their own benefit in the first place.
They are the ones who get benefits from this issue.
As for Iraqis, maybe they have the change they have been waiting for, but they paid high price for it as you can see the killings, devastation and sectarian violence.
And up to now the situation is still unstable,” said Qassim Abdullah, an Iraqi citizen.
What benefits?
The Iraqi people see the benefit — a yearly celebration of the US departure.
Via Pakistan’s Daily Times:
Shouting slogans in support of the “resistance,” the demonstrators held up banners and placards inscribed with phrases like, “Now we are free” and “Fallujah is the flame of the resistance.”
In the centre of the city surrounded by the Iraqi army, demonstrators carried posters bearing photos of apparent insurgents, faces covered and carrying weapons.
They also held up pictures of US soldiers killed and military vehicles destroyed in the two major offensives against the city in 2004.
The demonstration was dubbed the first annual “festival to celebrate the role of the resistance.”
In the place of flowers.
President Obama traveled yesterday to Fort Bragg, N.C., to add his two-cents worth to the madness, claiming the Iraqi adventure “an extraordinary achievement,” and let it go at that.
And, of course, the US will continue to have a presence in country: The embassy compound is by far the largest the world has ever seen, at one and a half square miles, big enough for 94 football fields. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to build (coming in about $150 million over budget). Inside its high walls, guard towers and machine-gun emplacements lie not just the embassy itself, but more than 20 other buildings, including residential quarters, a gym and swimming pool, commercial facilities, a power station and a water-treatment plant.
Along with all this shit, a staff of 16,000.
Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama Al Nujaifi has called that high number of personnel “illogical.”
Not by warped, horrifying US logic, however.
Again, one wonders, why the jails aren’t full of George Jr.’s lackeys.
Not Funny
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“The issue is not whether the Iraqi people will greet U.S. soldiers as their liberators, but what will they do six months after that.
I find it naive and disingenuous to claim that you can create democracy in Iraq any time soon.
The administration has already assured us that the U.S. will not stay there for very long, and, if that is the case, then the goal of establishing a constitutional system in Iraq is a joke.”
– Gen. William Odom, February 2003
The late Gen. Odom was my most-favorite commentator on the whole messed-up adventure in Iraq — he pulled no punches and was a welcome sight on PBS.
Of course, the network and cable news outlets wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole — they had the Pentagon’s generals to provide biased-color commentary on the Iraqi business.
Odom called the real deal: “The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.”
An ugly joke with one long, asshole-of-a-punchline.
(Illustration found here).
The latest bit of shit to come out of Iraq — beyond President Obama’s phoney-baloney announcement that ‘all’ US troops will be out of that destroyed country by this year’s end — is a report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) on another disaster within the greater disaster.
The lede graph in the CNN story tells the tale:
As the U.S. military heads towards the exits in Iraq, a new report released Sunday on a major reconstruction project there reads like a critique of the war in general — poorly planned, unexpectedly costly, years behind schedule and with an uncertain future.
The project in question is the Fallujah Waste Water System, an operation that should have raised alarms at its very conception, but back in those days, no one with any sense at all was in charge.
Another example of wasted lives and treasure — the system was supposed to handle 100,000 Iraqi homes, but up to last month, only 6,000 have been connected, and the project was suppose to cost $35 million, but now its cost is $100 million with no end in sight.
In fact:
“In the end, it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy.”
“Coupled with the fact that the outcome achieved was a wastewater treatment system operating at levels far below what was anticipated, it is difficult to conclude that the project was worth the $100 million investment and the many lives lost.”
Gen. Odom would turn over in his grave with shame.
As the so-called last of US troops get ready to depart, they will leave in their wake a country that’s not only dangerous, but completely screwed.
Also included in that SIGIR report was comments from Lt. Gen. Babakir Zebari, Iraq’s defense chief, who says that the Iraqi military won’t be able to operate on its own until sometime between 2020 and 2024.
WTF!
Until then what happens?
Gen. Odom underestimated the horror — beyond the US tragedy (4,481 GIs killed, more than 32,000 wounded, and more than 30 percent of all US armed forces have some form of PTSD) the death and destruction to the Iraqi nation is near impossible to grasp.
From The Nation last week:
The Brookings Institute estimates that 115,250 Iraqi civilians were killed during the war.
Iraq Body Count puts the figure at between 103,158 and 112,724 people.
Other estimates of excess deaths from the war, such as the Lancet survey and the Opinion Research Business survey, are substantially higher, but it is enough here to grapple with the most conservative estimates.
…
But that comparison understates how devastating the war has been to Iraq, because it ignores Iraqi combatants who’ve been killed, and neither does it address displaced persons.
By a conservative estimate, 3,700,000 Iraqis have been displaced from their homes by the war.
By way of comparison, a year after Hurricane Katrina, the population of a devastated New Orleans had shrunk by 378,000 people.
Or put another way, if you cleared every last person out of Los Angeles, you could fill the city back up to its current population with displaced Iraqis.
And further to inflame an out-of-control fire, 40 percent of Iraqi professionals have left the country since 2003, and Iraq had 34,000 physicians before the invasion, now have about 12,000.
A shitty life there, and it’s George Jr.’s fault — why isn’t he in jail?
The financial cost of the Iraqi war keeps piling up — for a never-ending dial, see Cost of War — the amount this morning is $801,234,070…and climbing by the second.
The Christian Science Monitor remembers this: When President George W. Bush launched the war, charging incorrectly that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon estimated its cost at $50 billion to $60 billion. Economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey got in hot water at the White House when he guessed in public the war could cost as much as $200 billion.
Ha!
I’m not joking — If I was joking, it’d go something like this: Horse walks into a bar, bartender asks, “Why the long face?”