$700bn US bailout near sum squandered in Iraq - Belfast Telegraph

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

USA!! USA!! As the author points out, The Shi'a are slaughtering the Sunnis and we're claiming "victory".

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/robert-fisk/700bn-us-bailout-near-sum-squandered-in-iraq-13987211.html

It was a weird week to be in the United States. On Tuesday, secretary of the treasury Henry Paulson told us that “this is all about the American taxpayer — that's all we care about”.

But when I flipped the page on my morning paper, I came across the latest gloomy statistic which Americans should care more about. “As of Wednesday evening, 4,162 US service members and 11 Defence Department civilians had been identified as having died in the Iraq war.”

By grotesque mischance, $700bn — the cost of George Bush's Wall Street rescue cash — is about the same figure as the same President has squandered on his preposterous war in Iraq, the war we have now apparently “won” thanks to the “surge” — for which, read “escalation” — in Baghdad. The fact that the fall in casualties coincides with the near-completion of the Shia ethnic cleansing of Sunni Muslims is not part of the story.

Indeed, a strange narrative is now being built into the daily history of America. First we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the evil misogynist Islamist crazies called the Taliban, setting up a democratic government under the exotically dressed Hamid Karzai. Then we rushed off to Iraq and overthrew the evil nuclear-weaponised, secular Baathist crazies under Saddam, setting up a democratic government under the pro-Iranian Shia Nouri al-Maliki. Mission accomplished. Then, after 250,000 Iraqi deaths we rushed back to Kabul and Kandahar to win the war all over again in Afghanistan.

The conflict now embraces our old chums in Pakistan, the Saudi-financed, American-financed Interservices Intelligence Agency whose Taliban friends — now attacked by our brave troops inside Pakistani sovereign territory — again control half of Afghanistan

[QueenOfCalifornia]

1. Pretty damned pathetic

isn't it?

Billions lost in Iraq. It was supposed to be a cake walk.

It is wretched.
and yes... We are fucked. :(

[livelongandprosper]

2. And the recent funding approved for the Pentagon

was what? $630 billion? Noone said boo about that, either.

This is why I don't buy the public's outrage. Most people who oppose this bailout bill are hypocrites.

[whosinpower]

3. Which begs the obvious question

How exactly did the US fund the war in the first place? Is this the ultimate result of borrowing to finance a war? And the resulting global lack of confidence in the US ability to repay its loans considering its fundamental strength is only on mortgages of the american taxpayer- and that blowing up in their face with its hideous ponzi scheme to sell that value on the open market.......

Given those concepts, I cannot fathom how a 700 billion intervention would help at all.

[tama]

4. EU is panicking

and the 700 000 billion would be to calm their nerves by buying back some of the crow that Wall Street sold them. Either that, or goodbuy US now, no more attempt to postpone the inevitable, seems the be the message from EU & co to US.