Real Costs and Agenda of Iraq War

[Merrill]

As for the real costs of the war, they could hardly be clearer. Targeted for cutbacks in federal money are virtually all social programs--Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, housing, job training and child care, education and student loans, environmental protection, public transportation, science research, even veterans' benefits and school funding for children of military personnel.

Jeffrey Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management and former economic and foreign policy official in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations, warns that the increases in spending on war and homeland security are "aggravating an already acute fiscal problem, eroding economic vitality" and creating "the kind of politically paralyzing guns-or-butter debate that characterized the Vietnam era."

Maybe so for Garten and everyone to his left, but not for Bush and his constituency. The direct impact of the war on the economy gives us more guns and less social butter, a constructive outcome for the right wing oligarchy now ruling this country.

More juicy details:
http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/

Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as "the prize."

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43045/?comments=view&cID=257615&pID=2574112003-04/13du_boff.cfm


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4354269.stm

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article2132467.ece

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Welcome to DU!

and the article is correct. I really think there is a group of rich CEOs out there who care only about amassing more and more for themselves. To my mind, they are poor--its spiritual poverty, and that's the worst kind.