Iraq War: Cost-Benefit Analysis of Iraq War (Guardian)

[Miss Authoritiva]

George Galloway
Anti-war campaigner and independent MP for Glasgow Kelvin

Monday March 15, 2004

The Guardian

You have to adopt a cost-benefit analysis. The one benefit is the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Baghdad, but the costs of that so massively outweigh it that the enterprise must be judged a failure and bankrupt.

The costs can be calibrated in a hundred different ways, starting with the number of Iraqi people who were slaughtered (we don't know how many they were, because nobody was counting and, indeed, the US administration openly boasts that it can't be expected to count the number of Iraqis it killed); the number of maimed and wounded; the millions whose lives have been wrecked, who, even now, a year after the war, have no regular supplies of electricity or water and still lack basic necessities. And the vast majority are unemployed.

Then we begin to tally up secondary costs like the effective break-up of Iraq from what was effectively one country into a series of confessionary cantonments; the balkanisation of Iraq in a way that will be very difficult to put back together again; and the uncorking of the bottle from which the genie of Islamic fundamentalism has sprung. (All of this entirely predictable and entirely predicted by me and many others.)

That religious fundamentalism is out and stalking the land and seeking political power and, other than by denying democratic elections, in the short term it's impossible to see how it can be denied power. Iraq will soon be led by men in turbans with long beards, whose ideological inspirations are the Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama Bin Laden. There may come a day, maybe sooner than you think, when western policy makers may be wishing Saddam was back.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4873526-111321,00.html

[billbuckhead]

1. Basically. bad for America, but good for GE, Halliburton,BigOil& Carlyle

[papau]

2. DOD released Bush photo-op at Iraq casualty bedside. He is

Never seen near a dead body or a blown off face or limb - but smile with baby at bedside makes a great campaign photo.

[salib]

3. No, please, no

War is THE last resort. There is NO cost-benefit analysis. It is all cost. Remember FDR: "I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded . . . I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed . . . I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war."

'nuff said.