Bradley Manning: incarcerated and on trial for his life for unmasking war crimes while the co-conspirators who committed those crimes live in luxury, enjoying the privileges of their class and wealth.

Iraq War Cost $800 Billion, And What Do We Have To Show For It?

For the past few months, a strange thing has been happening in the central Iraq town of Fallujah. Thousands of citizens, virtually all of them Sunni Muslims, have been gathering in public squares to protest the oppressive Shiite-led government in Baghdad. Sleeping in tents and wielding Twitter feeds and YouTube accounts, the young Sunnis have attempted to take democracy, and a certain sectarian disaffection, into their own hands.

It’s not quite the Iraqi Arab Spring — although that’s what it’s been tentatively called by some — but it is a reminder of the stark failure of nearly a decade of American-led warfare in that country.

When President George W. Bush announced the invasion into Iraq in March 2003, the goal was to remove a dangerous dictator and his supposed stocks of weapons of mass destruction. It was also to create a functioning democracy and thereby inspirewhat Bush called a “global democracy revolution.”

The effort was supposed to be cheap — to require few troops and even less time. Instead, it cost the United States $800 billion at least, thousands of lives and nearly nine grueling years (see the graphic below for a further breakdown of various costs).

The toll on the people of Iraq were even greater. A decade of war left chaos and impoverishment, hundreds of thousands of citizens dead and millions more displaced, and a vicious sectarianism that still threatens to rip the country apart at the seams. The government of Nouri al-Maliki, which has reportedly interfered with independent government bureaucracies and ordered the arrest of his Sunni vice president on trumped-up terrorism charges, often rules in a manner more befitting the autocrat the U.S. invaded to remove.

“Here is a country that’s being liberated,” proclaimed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a few days into the invasion, even as the first signs of the chaos to come began to stir. “Here are people that are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they’re free.”

Instead, today in Fallujah, the site of two of the war’s largest and most devastating military campaigns, the very best that can be said is that two years late to the party — not 10 years early — the Arab Spring has arrived. But the government the people are rising up against is the very one the U.S. installed.

What does it mean to say that the war in Iraq was a wasted effort? Last month, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction filed a final report that found $8 billion of U.S. development aid had been “wasted outright,” in the words of Wired magazine.

But nearly eight times as much money — $60 billion — was spent rebuilding the country on the whole, with very little to show for it.

And more than 10 times that amount — $800 billion — was spent on the mission overall, a boondoggle that left more than 4,000 American service members dead, 32,000 more wounded, and an authoritarian government in place that is little better — and possibly, owing to its closer ties to Iran, worse — than the one that was taken out.

Was any of that money wasted? Was any of it not?

http://bit.ly/IraqWarCost_HuffPost

Looking Back on Ten Years of War, Trauma, Death, & Displacement

Looking Back on Ten Years of War, Trauma, Death, & Displacement

Major studies of war mortality

Three major studies of war mortality have been done in Iraq. Two appeared in The Lancet, the British medical journal, and one appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. They bear strong similarities in their findings, but have some important differences, too.

The first household survey that appeared was published in The Lancet in October 2004, measuring the war-related mortality in the war’s first 18 months. The researchers–mainly epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and medical personnel in Iraq–estimated 98,000 “excess deaths” due to war. Read

The second household survey, conducted by the Hopkins scientists again, was completed in June 2006 and published four months later in The Lancet. Its findings: 650,000 people (civilians and fighters) died as a result of the war in Iraq. Read

Another household survey, this one conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health at the same time as the second Hopkins study, found 400,000 excess deaths, 151,000 by violence. As is the case with most such surveys conducted during time of war, there were problems in data gathering and the analysis tended to minimize violent death estimates. But the survey generally confirmed the very high mortality reported in The Lancet. Read

It should be noted that both the second Lancet article and the New England Journal of Medicine article were based on studies that were completed at the height of war-related violence in Iraq. Large-scale fighting continued for another year and slowly subsided for a year after that to lower but continuing levels. So their estimates are a fraction of the total caused by the war.

In 2008, the peer-reviewed journal, Conflict and Health, published“Iraq War Mortality Estimates: A Systematic Review,” and found that the household survey method was superior to other forms of counting.

Other Estimates

Several other attempts have been made to estimate the war dead, and particularly civilians killed by violence. Iraq Body Count is the most well known. It counted individuals reported in English-language newspapers, mainly, which severely limited its scope. Similarly, the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index and the U.N. office in Iraq used “passive surveillance” methods (reports from morgues as well as newspapers). The problem with these methods is that they only capture part of the total picture (as with morgue statistics), their “surveillance instrument” (i.e., newspapers) change over time, and so on. (See the discussion of methods in the Conflict and Health article cited above.) They are mainly useful for viewing trends. Wikileaks also released U.S. military data in 2010, but this was also quite partial–reports from U.S. military personnel.

In 2013, a group of scholars at Columbia University’s School of Public Health published a comparison of the Wikileaks and Iraq Body Count estimates, and found a small percentage of single reported deaths overlapping–indicating that the total dead was significantly higher than either estimate held.

Displacement: Refugees and internally displaced

The number of displaced persons, both internal (within Iraq) and external (refugees, mainly in Jordan and Syria) ranged from estimates of 3.5 million to 5 million or more, which were directly attributable to the war. Virtually all first-hand accounts blamed violence as the cause of moving, or threats of ethnic or sectarian cleansing of neighborhoods.

The ravages of displacement, which remains at about 3 million, are bad enough. But it is also another indicator of the scale of mortality. All wars since 1945 have ratios of displaced to fatalities of 10:1 or less, typically more in the range of 5:1. If this typical ratio holds for the Iraq War, that indicates mortality of about one million Iraqis.

– Maps of displacement inside Iraq (up to 2011)

– According UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, the total number of internally displaced equals more than 1.3 million, and the number of refugees exceeds 1.4 million. Total “persons of concern” exceed 3 million. UNHCR web site

– Analysis of internally displaced crisis by International Rescue Committee, a major NGO (March 2013)

– An assessment of IDP situation by the Middle East Institute (Oct 2012)

– Iraqi Refugee Stories – first-hand accounts (video)

– Analysis and advocacy on Iraqi refugees from Human Rights First
Health Effects of War

Health-related impacts on children in Iraq, from the Brussels Tribunal and Global Research, Canada, dewscribes the broad effects on children, including birth defects, cancer, denial of rights, etc. (February 2013).

Environmental Contaminants from War Remnants in Iraq, a well-documented 2011 report that focuses mainly on depleted uranium and its carcinogenic qualities

“Effects of the War on Nutrition and Health…in Children,” measured effects empirically in the mot violent areas (2009) and found profound impacts on children’s health.

Birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq, rise markedly, says a 2011 medical study. Fallujah, the largest city in Anbar province, was the scene of two enormous battles between US forces and “insurgents.”

Metal contamination: “Within less than a decade, the occurrence of congenital birth defects increased by an astonishing 17-fold in the same hospital.” Medical study, 2012.  Source:  Iraq: The Human Cost of War.