TEHRAN TIMES SAYS IRAQ OCCUPATION IS COSTING US A WHOPPING $5.54 MILLION AN HOUR

I doubt if there is any other blog on the internet that brings you what is being printed in the TEHRAN TIMES published in Tehran, Iran.


Here is the lead story from TEHRAN TIMES:

Iraq occupation is costing the United States a whopping $5.54m an hour

The occupation phase of the Iraq war is costing the United States $1,538 a second, or $92,333 a minute, or $5,540,000 an hour.

That works out to $133 million a day, or $3.99 billion a month. Let’s round it off at $4 billion a month.

By Kaleem Omar
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=167952

President George W. Bush last week asked Congress to approve $ 70 billion in funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the U.S. fiscal year 2009, which begins on October 1, 2008. The Iraq war has already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $ 500 billion dollars, and there is still no end in sight to the U.S.’s utterly illegal occupation of Iraq. According to congressional analysts, the eventual total cost of the Iraq war and the occupation could be as high as $ 1.5 trillion – that’s $ 1,500 billion.

This cost does not include the cost of rebuilding Iraq’s shattered infrastructure, which has been destroyed by a massive U.S. bombing campaign and other military action. Once an oil-rich country with the best educational and medical infrastructure in the Middle East, Iraq has now been reduced to little more than an economic basket case. Even Baghdad, the capital, still gets only a few hours of electricity a day.

Thousands of Iraqis continue to die each month as a result of the war and U.S. occupation. According to a survey carried out by Britain’s Opinion Research Business, since the beginning of the war in March 2003 up to the end of September 2007, over 1.2 million Iraqis have died violent deaths as a result of the conflict.

The total number of American soldiers killed is about 4,500 up to the end of last month. That’s a death ratio of one American per 266 Iraqis. It is anybody’s guess as to how many more Iraqis will be killed before the U.S. occupation ends – if ever it does.


According to Newsweek magazine, however, this $ 4 billion a month figure is just the beginning. “It doesn’t include the cost of running Iraq’s government and rebuilding it, which could be an additional billion a month, according to rough UN estimates made before the war,” Newsweek noted. “Then there’s the matter of Iraq’s enormous debts…Estimates of the total external debt, including war reparations to Kuwait, run well over $ 100 billion. How will the reconstruction be funded? For the administration it’s an especially painful question, in part because it comes at a time when the U.S. economy is in the doldrums, when budget deficits are ballooning and when tax cuts are the preferred method of getting business churning again.” The White House forecast last week that the U.S. budget deficit would be about $455 billion in the current fiscal year. The Bush administration said that the deficit had been exacerbated by a weak U.S. economy, the Iraq war and tax cuts.

But whose fault is the weak U.S. economy, the Iraq war and tax cuts? The answer, of course, is that it is the Bush administration’s own fault.

To read the full TEHRAN TIMES story click on this link: http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=167952