Five Years Later

I know you don't like it when I get all serious. I know. But hey, life isn't all about fun and games, is it? No, it's not. Sometimes life is short, nasty, and brutish. And from time to time, we need to be reminded of that. So's we can appreciate the good things even more and avoid poor decision-making in the future. It also chaps me that it's so easy to forget about the wars going on right now, that the powers that be haven't asked anything from us, that it's a page 12 story, that we'd rather read about Spitzer humping hos than Iraqi veterans doing three tours in a row because our military is spread too thin.

Ergo, vis-a-vis, cogito ergo sum, I now interrupt your restaurant dining, beer drinking, NCAA bracket picking, movie watching, pot smoking, Easter celebrating, sex having, jeans shopping, money making, Kristen following, club hopping, wedding planning, and vacation traveling for a very important reminder. I know you probably gave it little attention, just like I did, but a couple of days ago, the United States celebrated a special anniversary. March 19, 2008 marked the five year anniversary of our invasion of Iraq. Five years since Shock & Awe. Five years since we were greeted as liberators. Five years since we sent our young men and women to stop Iraqis from being murdered. Five years since we invaded to find and destroy Saddam's stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. Five years. That's longer than World War I. Longer than World War II. Not longer than the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1964 to 1973, but we'll get there.

So, five years later, how we doin' George?

Here's the tally:

3,992 confirmed American military dead.

145 of these deaths were self-inflicted, i.e. suicide.

175 confirmed UK military dead.

Dozens of military dead from other countries who helped form the "Coalition of the Willing."

What about the Iraqi civilian dead? For some reason, that number's a little harder to pin down. The Iraq Body Count project estimates that between 82,000 and 89,000 Iraqis have died so far as a result of the Iraq War. A Washington Post report back in October 2004 -- three and a half years ago -- estimated over 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died since the invasion. Then there's the medical journal, Lancet, which published a survey in October 2006 that estimated there were over 654,000 Iraqis dead, or 2.5% of the population. That's a lot of dead Iraqis, and that's a year and a half ago. At the very least, we have a fair estimate that 90,000 Iraqis have died as a result of this war, on the low end. The real number is likely far higher. Possibly ten times higher. How soon before we can start calling it a holocaust (def. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life)?

What about the wounded, or as the Department of Defense likes to call them, "non-mortal casualties"?

Most estimates hold that there are 29,395 American military wounded. If we were fighting this war in 1968, more likely than not, a good portion of these 29,395 would be in the "mortal casualties" column. What do these wounded soldiers look like? They look like this (pictures courtesy of HBO):




Actually, I found many pictures that look far worse than this. Far worse. I thought about posting more graphic pictures on here to drive the point home, the point that a lot of people have endured extreme sacrifice in this war, this war of opportunity, not necessity, but decided against it. Our soldiers are coming home without arms, legs, eyes, entire faces. One picture I found was of a U.S. marine standing next to his bride in a wedding picture. He's wearing a crisp navy blue uniform, standing rod straight. His entire face is burned off. His hair and ears too. All you see where his face used to be are two slits for eyes, a nub of a nose that looks like it was torn in half, and two thick full lips, which somehow, improbably, survived the fireball intact. His wife is standing next to him. She's in full health, she looks just like any other 24 year-old bride. Except she's not looking at him. She's staring blankly ahead. Her face is frozen, like she's a wax statue. The look on her face is one of shock and fear. This isn't what I signed up for, her eyes say.

And then there are the pictures of the Iraqi dead and wounded. Corpses on the street. Pools of bloody water. Infants with scabbed faces. Little girls with wounds that no child should ever have to see with her own eyes, let alone suffer herself. Since I didn't post them here, do me a favor. Take a break on your busy Friday, go to Google, click on "Images" on the upper left, and then do a search for "Iraq wounded." Then take a good, long, slow look at the face of this war. Let it come home to you for a minute. Just 60 seconds. Then you can go back to your bagel and coffee and NCAA brackets.

How are we doing on the financials? Accountant?!! Get in here!

According to Congressional Research Service, the cost of the Iraq War so far is $800 billion. [Editorial note: I initially wrote that the war had cost us $171 billion to date. That number was incorrect and my mistake demonstrates why I suck at math and never became a scientist. The actual number by the end of 2008 will be more than four times that, or $800 billion.] That's a lot of hospitals, fixed bridges, health care subsidies, paved roads, new schools, job investments, and need-based scholarships. This year, we'll likely spend $12 billion per month on this war. That's $3 billion a week. Hmmmm. Cost-benefit. Hmmmm. Al Qaeda and Taliban stronger than before in Pakistan and Afghanistan. No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. More Iraqi dead as a result of this war than under Saddam. Iran with more influence in Iraq than ever before. Hmmmm. And all this only cost us $800 billion!

One reason that this war's been so expensive (besides the rampant graft going on and all those black market payoffs we have to make to Iraqis with guns so they won't shoot at us in this "successful" surge we've got going on) is that it costs the U.S. government $180,000 annually to fund and maintain a single army sergeant in Iraq. As previously mentioned, however, we don't have enough soldiers, we're tapped out. So, in the true capitalist spirit, what do we do? We BUY some! We pay private military security contractors to do what our soldiers would normally do if we had a draft.

Olllld Blackwater, keep on rollin', Mississippi moon won't you keep on shinin' on meeeee?

Problem is, private contractors don't come cheap. They didn't volunteer for this shit, after all. So while it costs $180,000 for an army sergeant, it costs more than double that -- $445,000 per year -- to fund a private security contractor in Iraq. In 2007, the State Department spent more than $4 billion on private protection. Your tax dollars at work so you and your sons and daughters don't have to get drafted to fight this war. What a wonderful precedent this is setting.

Anyway, who's making money on this war? Halliburton ($21 billion in no-bid war contracts), Bechtel, CACI, Titan, and Aegis Defense Services, to name a few. The price of oil has gone from $30 or so dollars a barrel when the Iraq War began, to $110 dollars a barrel today. Sweet.

But hey, I don't want to end this on a sad note. It's Friday after all, and you all know what Friday means! Let's see if we can find the humor in all this. Jon Stewart summed it up perfectly last night on The Daily Show. If you missed it, here it is:



Sure would be funny if it wasn't so fucking tragic.