Twisting the Knife

Huck Gutman has an article at Common Dreams entitled, Lying About The Real Cost of The Iraq War. He says,

While Congress was in session this week debating such momentous issues as whether to prevent the courts from interfering with the Pledge of Allegiance and whether to make it illegal to use women’s bodies to raise stem cells (in point of fact, all stem cells are taken from in vitro fertilization), a remarkable report came out in a minor government committee, a report on the cost of the US "global war on terrorism." What is particulary revealing in the report is its provision of very specific numbers for the cost, in dollars, of the Iraq War.

It's the GAO Report, Global War On Terrorism: Observations on Funding, Costs, and Future Commitments. Contrary to the Administration's initial estimates of 50 to 100 billion, the GWOT has so far cost US Taxpayers at least 430 billion 128 million dollars ... and counting.

The GAO doesn't indicate there is any sign of the spending tapering off, either. The Administration's apologists claim it was an error--an inaccurate prediction of costs. But Gutman tells it like it is:

This, then, is the truth, revealed more clearly than ever before: The Bush administration, which thought up the war and then urged it upon the American people, lied to us, lied about the cost of the war. If Americans knew what the war in Iraq would cost in dead, brave, American soldiers; if Americans knew how many other brave soldiers would return gravely wounded; if Americans knew that making war on Iraq would cut the heart out of HeadStart and Medicaid and would bankrupt state and local governments as revenue sharing declined and unfunded mandates increased -- if, in other words, Americans had known the costs of the war in Iraq, they would not have been eager to support the President.

It has all been a tissue of lies, from weapons of mass destruction to the irresponsible low-ball estimates of the war’s costs, to the unfulfilled claims that Iraqi oil would pay for our troops.

What flabbergasts Paul Krugman, on the other hand, isn't so much the lying as the stubbornness. According to Krugman,

Vice President Cheney continues to insist that his two most famous pronouncements about Iraq -- his declaration before the invasion that we would be "greeted as liberators" and his assertion a year ago that the insurgency was in its "last throes" -- were "basically accurate."

Krugman goes on to assert that William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and favored Fox News pundit, claims that the only real problem with the neocon agenda is a lack of will, and that we just need to launch airstrikes against Iran. Then everything will come out right in the end.

The only way, in truth, that things will come out right in the end, though, is if the American people impeach all of these lying, phony warriors, try and convict them of waging aggressive war and war profiteering, and force the whole BushCo corporate cabal to come up with reparations to pay back the Iraqi people and the American taxpayers the money that's been stolen from them.

After that, we can turn them over to the World Court.