There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam and bin Laden despised each other. Almost all the 9/11 plotters came from Saudi Arabia and bin Laden was holed up in Pakistan.
Why didn’t the U.S. invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Because Saudi Arabia sells the U.S. cheap oil and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. George W. Bush said, ”If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq…They’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions.” Alan Greenspan alluded to the “politically inconvenient fact” that the war was “largely about oil.”
The true cost of war can never be measured but consider this:
- 6,657 Americans are dead.
- 1,653 limbs have been amputated.
- 50,000 have been wounded, of whom 16,000 have been severely wounded.
- 43,299 Traumatic Brian Injuries.
- 200 veterans are in need of face transplants.
Harvard economist Linda Bilmes has estimated that the health care bill for the wounded could reach half a trillion dollars over the next few decades.
The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.
Bankrupting. Boondoggles.
I haven’t even mentioned the deaths of Iraqi and Afghan civilians; I’m not sure Americans care about those. But I write about this because I want Americans to remember, to never be so easily fooled ever again. I write about this because seared into my memory is a photo of just one 12 year-old boy in the hospital in Iraq. His parents were blown to bits during Shock & Awe. He had no parents…and he had no arms. And he was twelve years-old.
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