$2.5 TRILLION- ACCRUAL COST OF BUSH'S WAR ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN

[Jcrowley]

$2.5 TRILLION – Accrual Cost of Bush War on Women & Children

by Ben Heine /MWC NEWS

A recent article in the highly respected humanitarian UK journal The New Statesman quoted an estimate of the accrual cost (i.e. the long-term committed cost) of the Bush War on Terror at $2.5 TRILLION – and the estimate came from 2001 Economics Nobel Laureate US Professor Stiglitz (Columbia) and Professor Linda Bilmes (Harvard).

A major long-term cost is due to the death and injury of US soldiers. Thus the article states that “for every soldier dying in Iraq or Afghanistan today, 16 are being wounded”; that “611,729 veterans from the first Gulf war are now receiving disability benefits; a large proportion are suffering from psychiatric illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression”; and that “Bilmes and Stiglitz estimate the additional cost to the economy of the death of a young soldier - typically 25 years old - to be $6.5m”. A horrifying aspect of the New Statesman story was Veteran’s Administration (VA) reactions after Professor Bilmes went public: thus “the number of wounded listed on the VA website dropped from 50,508 to 21,649”. The Bush Administration has also evidently made VA economics expert Professor Bilmes persona non grata ( details ).

This expert Mainstream assessment of Bush War costs to the US taxpayer leads us to another kind of analysis – the Cost to the Iraqi and Afghan victims. If we assume, together with all decent Americans, the core of the American Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal and have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” then we can use this information from US Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University) and his Harvard colleague Professor Bilmes to assess (a) the VALUE Bush-ite Amerikans place on Iraqi, Afghan and indeed on Asian and non-European lives and (b) the BILL that racist America is surely obliged to pay for its appalling war crimes in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories. However before doing so we must get expert advice on the post-invasion excess deaths.

As of March 2007, after 4 years of war, the post-invasion Iraqi excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) now total ONE MILLION as estimated from data from a top US medical epidemiology group in the World’s top Public Health School (the Nobel Laureate-containing Bloomberg School of Public Health) at the top US Johns Hopkins University, published peer-reviewed in the top UK medical journal The Lancet and endorsed by 27 top Australian medical experts.

http://mwcnews.net/content/view/13099/42/

[JohnnyLib2]

1. K & R.

This is the ugly undercurrent that doesn't seem to get much attention.
Iraq = the "credit card" buying plan.

[Jcrowley]

2. Women's lives unraveling in Iraq

UNITED NATIONS (IPS) — Amid the chaos and violence of U.S.-occupied Iraq, the significance of widespread gender-based violence has been largely overlooked, according to a groundbreaking report released here by MADRE, an internationally active women's human rights organization.

Iraqi women are enduring unprecedented levels of assault in the public sphere, including widespread abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, honor killings, domestic abuse, torture in detention, beheadings, shootings and public hangings, said the report titled "Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the U.S. War on Iraq".

"Women are not only being targeted because they are members of the civilian population, women — in particular those who are perceived to pose a challenge to the political aspirations of their attackers — have increasingly been targeted simply because they are women," said Houzan Mahmoud, a representative of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), at a panel discussion here that coincided with the report's launch.

"Before the U.S. occupation, Iraq was a dictatorship, it was not perfect, but there was security, women could go to work, could go out," Mahmoud told IPS.

"What little protections for women there were before the occupation are now gone," she stressed.

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m31258&hd=&size=1&l=e