By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
Earlier this week, United States President Barack Obama officially announced this end of so-called “Operation Iraqi Freedom” – the illegal invasion and occupation of the oil-rich Miseast country – with the vow that all American tropps would be home by the end of this month.
Of course, Obama failed to mention that many thousands of Amerikkkan mercenaries – soldiers of fortune – contractors would remain there for many more years at a cost of many more billions of dollars.
After all, each of these private soldiers is paid about $100,000 a year and the corporations – such as Blackwater or Xi or its latest incarnation, Academi – that hire the private soldiers are allowed to profit off the back of each private soldier to the tune of another $100,000 a year.
You’d think the executives of these corporate private armies were actually risking their own lives and limbs; but, alas, they are not.
The Obama adminstration has also prevaricated on this immoral war of aggression in two other important ways: Both in its declaration of some sort of laudable achievement and its summarization of the total cost of that most unholy war.
The administration claims the war cost “only $800 billion,” as if that in itself weren’t already far too much.
But the real financial cost – not to mention the human cost – is actually more than $3.5 TRILLION, when certain collateral costs are also counted – such as lifetime pensions and health care for the many thousands of young American men and women who have or will return home with their bodies and/or their minds totally destroyed; such as for the exorbitant cost of replacing hardware and ammunition destroyed in battle; and such as for the interest that will have to be paid on the hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed to finance the aggression.
And as for what’s been accomplished over the course of nine years of repugnant aggression against an almost defenceless people, well there’s very little there to be proud of.
Iraq is no more a democracy than it was nine years ago; its streets are no safer than they were nine years ago; most of its infrastructure and a vast portion of its housing and economic stock have been destroyed; and the people and the government of the new Iraq have not been dissuaded from the influence of Iran.
The only thing that has been gained for that $3.5-TRILLION is access by Amerikkka’s oil billionaires and mega-millionaires to the vast oil reserves of this beleaguered nation.
The only thing that has been gained for the thousands of American and allied lives terminated or destroyed, the more than one million Iraqi lives terminated, and the rendering homeless of millions of Iraqis has been a few tens of billions of dollars for the Amerikkkan oil billionaires and mega-millionaires.
It would have been far cheaper and far less horrific for Uncle Sam to just have given those tens of billions of dollars to the already magnificently wealthy and be done with it.
But no! Even as it goes through the death throes of its collapsing global empire, Amerikkka still must wage its fruitless and interminable war of aggression against anyone who can’t fight back.