I know this is not what you were asking and its fucked up. But, I really wouldn't have that big a problem with it if it were the government filling it's coffers to pay for things like the billion dollar debt we had before the war. The winners of wars are not supposed to go bankrupt. Instead we have the douchbags at Kellogg, Brown, & Root and Blackwater making billions while American soldiers are dying over some bullshit. And, they're not even honest about it!
However, there is the school of thought that this war allowed US companies to fill their pockets and gain access to oil that they previously were unable to get. In other words, the US government might not have prospered, but American companies (and the American citizens who have an ownership stake in them) did.
The problem with being honest about a war like this is that you have to lie in order to get it started. No American will want to go to war to line the pockets of rich people. You have to give them some other reason. I wish they could have just come out and said "Halliburton alone is going to make billions off of this war. They employ Americans, and I encourage all of you with the means to buy their stock, because we're gonna feed them money on a silver platter." That would have been awesome.
I am not of the school of thought that what's good for multi-national corporations is good for America. Just because these companies have a few offices in the states that does not make them American.
Even if they had said which companies were going to make billions of the war chances are most people would not have been able to afford a significant amount of stock anyway. So, it still would not have benefited us.
Why do people have to afford a significant amount of stock to benefit?
Why not buy a tiny amount of stock? Stock gains, unlike the income taxes, are not progressive. If the stock price doubles, it doubles for everyone who owns that stock.
Are "American" auto manufacturers - with most of their production lines outside of the US - still American? Are "foreign" auto manufacturers - who are increasingly moving their factories to the US and Canada - still foreign?
American companies don't have access to any more oil than they did previously. Iraq's oil is controlled by their oil ministry.
Are you suggesting that the countries we can wage war against are those without natural resources, lest we be accused or fighting for profit?
If we wanted to get cheap oil for our oil companies, it would have been far cheaper to lift the sanctions off of Saddam and just bought the oil from him.
> However, there is the school of thought that this war allowed US companies to fill their pockets and gain access to oil that they previously were unable to get.
Do you have information on which companies now have access to oil in Iraq?
Well two world wars moved the UK from being the largest financial power in the world to barely having a place at the top table. I fear this administration suffered the hubris attendent with being the world's acknowledged superpower and have overstretched the US economy with this war. Thankfully you chaps didn't have to pawn all the family silver: Iraq hasn't been a von Clauswitz 'total war': we had two of 'em, to both of which you guys showed up halfway through: and thank the gods you did, otherwise we'd have been much more fucked economically, even if Hitler effectively lost WWII by opening up the second front with Russia. You've spent trillions on this. And will be paying off the loans for years to come. We only finished paying you chaps our lend-lease loans from WWII in the new Millennium. I quote from wiki: The final payment of $83.3 million (£42.5 million) due on 31 December 2006 (repayment having been deferred on several occasions) was made on 29 December 2006, it being the last working day of the year. After this final payment Britain's Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, formally thanked the US for its wartime support.
Now you guys aren't as fucked as we were, but in the competition against China and India, you've just given yourselves a damn big handicap. The problem is the US will have to undergo restructuring to compete anyway. If you'd retained the financial cushion to soften the restructuring much social hardship and unrest could have been avoided. As is, if History is anything to go by, you shall reap as you've sown, alas, but that's just economics.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mysterious Chinese military buildup recently is their repo task force. First formal military attack on our soil in what, two hundred years? Other than those Japanese balloons in WWII, anyway.
Never said otherwise. Just pointing out that wars and empires cost money, rather than making money, but what empires did was guarantee supply lines. This cannot be done in the modern age, in fact has proved impracticable since the second half of the 20th Century. So aggresive wars are no longer cost effective. But they are a nice way of removing the taxpayer's dollar from their pocket, and putting it into the hands of the MI complex. And the taxpayers grandchildren's dollar too, if they can manage it.
Modern warfare has rarely ever been cost effective, at least not how we Americans fight it.
The military industrial complex cares about the Defense Budget, not our wars, which are paid for with supplementals.
Nothing expensive is being destroyed in Iraq or Afghanistan. We're not going to buy more aircraft carriers because of those wars. We're not going to order more F-22s. We might want to get the F-35s built faster as our older jets get worn out, but we're not going to need more than the original allotment.
Nothing expensive is being destroyed in Iraq. True, but what have we gained? Democracy for the surviving Iraqis? Better infrastructure? Higher standard of living? Better relations with the West? The possible destabilisation of Turkey? The everlasting gratitude of the Sunnis? Iraqis have got nothing out of it, excepting a nominal freedom to die from internal conflict. The US has nothing out of it, baring some dead heroes and a worldwide rep for a certain kind of behaviour. But Halliburton definitely has got something from the conflict. Check who the winners are. I have no quibble with Afghanistan, but Iraq was insanity first to last.
Iraq has gone from a net exporter of terrorism to a net importer, which makes the rest of the world a better place.
And guess what, we're winning the war against Al Qaeda in an Arab country. We couldn't do that in Afghanistan, because when we went to fight them there, they left. Al Qaeda is an Arab-dominated organization, and the Arabs (especially Sunni Arabs) don't give two shits about anyone else on the planet who isn't an (Sunni) Arab.
So we had to fight them in an Arab country. Which one? Well, if we were going to invade a country, why not invade the one we'd been at war with for the previous 12 years?
The invasion of Iraq was a no-brainer. The only mistake that was made was a complete disinterest by the Administration in the process of building post-war Iraq into a functioning country.
No truer words have ever been typed. Kinda like when I had unprotected sex with that heroine-addicted Haitian prostitute - that kind of no-brainer.
And, of course, George W. Bush is the no-brainer poster child. Without him as the Chief Sales Officer we could have never pulled off such a collosal no-brainer.
I'm too busy being fucking hillarious to spend time finding support for my position...
Seriously, though, I personally feel Iraq was a huge blunder. In my opinion, we should go to war if someone attacks us or we're 100% goddamn balls-on sure we're in imminent danger. Afganistan was totally cool - they harbored the people who attacked us. Iraq: they didn't attack us and they were not an imminent threat. Before we went in I said, we better know exactly what they have and where it is. Turns out we didn't. For me, that's a no-brainer.
This is bizarre. I was under the impression that Iraq had been a recruiting ground for terrorism. Rather than taking a bigger slice of the terrorist 'pie' for themselves, I thought they had just made the pie that much bigger. I'm trying to think of Iraqi sponsored terrorism post Gulf War I, ouside the Palestinians (which almost all Arab nations support in some way or other). And since Gulf War I the Iraqis had directed no terror at America that we know of.
The Council of Foreign Relations has a slightly different view, but even it (despite being non-partisan it is still stuffed with Government officials) has difficulty in making a realistic link between Al Qaeda and Saddam:
http://www.cfr.org/publication/7702/
The invasion of Iraq meant we could not, after 9/11, concentrate our forces in Afghanistan. Split forces, an unnecessary second front and two bad jobs rather than one done well.
We'd already all piled into Afghanistan with you guys. The whole world was waiting to help you clear that one up and sort it out once and for good. Russia and China were onside. NATO members were queuing up to send troops and supplies.
But someone wanted Iraq. Yes, it was a no-brainer: there we are in agreement entirely.
All that goodwill wasted. And at such a cost. And for so little return: after all, we still ain't caught Osama six years on. I don't know what sort of success that is.
We weren't getting much movement out of the Arab countries after 9/11. And Al Qaeda, rather than fighting to the end, fled Afghanistan, because they weren't about to get their ass-kicked on the behalf of a bunch of Pushtuns.
So given a need to motivate our Arab friends (and to get those nations in the region we weren't getting along with on the right track), we took out Saddam. That meant that Qaddafi (and apparently the Iranians) gave up their nuclear weapons programs. The Saudis got serious about the Al Qaeda fighters and supporters in their midst and pretty much every hothead in the Arab world showed up in Iraq where we killed them.
Al Qaeda has failed, because it killed too many innocent people and offered them only an incredibly strict and brutal life, which the Iraqis weren't eager to adopt.
Afghanistan remains important, but after December 2001 it wasn't a central front of the war.
We'd already all piled into Afghanistan with you guys. The whole world was waiting to help you clear that one up and sort it out once and for good. Russia and China were onside. NATO members were queuing up to send troops and supplies.
Sure, but what were they really going to do? Aside from the Brits, Aussies and Canadians, who else is really going to give us much support in Afghanistan?
I mean, the Germans are there as long as they won't get shot at and don't have to fight. Most of the other Europeans are just as useless. They possess neither the military budgets nor the quality of troops necessary for a tough fight in the Hindu Kush mountains. The Brits and Canadians are getting very irritated that they're the ones who have to bear most of the NATO burden.
So basically, you'd rather have us devote all of our efforts to Afghanistan, where our main enemies had already left and all of our more useless allies were willing to cheer us on because they weren't very interesting at putting their own soldiers at risk.
All that goodwill wasted.
That goodwill was a waste anyway. I mean, it was fueled by a massive loss of American life. Once we went out and started killing the people who did it, that goodwill started to deteriorate. Then, when we set out to fix the root of the problem, it evaporated. Utterly useless, unless we Americans feel like sacrificing our citizens to Al Qaeda every few years in the interest of having the worlds sympathy.
I mean, do you know what all the world's sympathy and goodwill will get you?
My understanding is Al Qaeda only moved into Iraq after the invasion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda_in_Iraq
And when they move from Iraq it will probably be to Saudi or dispersed throughout the Arab world. Iraq is both recruiting poster and training ground. So is Afghanistan, but I regard that as a different matter.
Iraqi has nothing to do with 9/11, and the goodwill didn't stop until other nations realised that the US and UK were going into Iraq whatever.
In some respects I'd finish the job properly in Afghanistan for structural reasons, but given that even in the 21st century every single major power has failed to cope with Afghanistan I'd rather not be there at all. Nevertheless the alliance was right to run Osama to ground and then try to bring him to bear.
I disagree about motivating our Arab chums: we're in danger of driving them into the arms of the Chinese or Russians, both of whom are beginning to flex their muscles in the post Iraqi-War world. Our strategic alliance with India has also meant that Pakistan has close contacts with China. Iran has close ties with Russia.
Given what we've spent for what we've got, we have to start realising that any war is hugely uneconomic: in fact a war is a good way to go from a balance of payments surplus to the largest deficit in history in the space of some seven years.
I think it would be sensible to only fight necessary wars. The holding pattern we had Saddam contained within wasn't broken. There were no WMD's and everyone knew it.
Three trillion dollars to show the Arab chaps what big dicks we have is frankly the height of ludicrous hubris. If I were in Halliburton I would have shovelled as much of the money in my direction too.
I'm coming to the conclusion that if you have a dairy herd, you might as well milk them.
I suppose, building tanks, for a profit, is reasonable. But if you are suggesting it is okay to shoot people, blow up homes and businesses, and generally disrupt society, just to make some quick cash, I think people are mostly opposed.
Lets go with the idea we went to Iraq for the oil. Lets say that is true. Why don't we have it yet? Our military could seize and control the oil fields.
There's no way to safely get the oil to port reliably. The number of tanker trucks necessary to make it a worthwhile operation would be attacked and blown up on a regular basis, making it unprofitable in an unstable country.
From what I can see, Iraq is exporting oil right now with no serious problems: "Production last year cracked the 2 million barrel per day average and is now regularly above it. Exports have followed suit, a boon to Iraq in times of even higher oil prices."
This means the oil could be exported safely from Iraq. So, since we have the military might to take it, and the war was just for the oil, why havn't the US forces taken the oil yet?
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 04:20 pm (UTC)The problem with being honest about a war like this is that you have to lie in order to get it started. No American will want to go to war to line the pockets of rich people. You have to give them some other reason. I wish they could have just come out and said "Halliburton alone is going to make billions off of this war. They employ Americans, and I encourage all of you with the means to buy their stock, because we're gonna feed them money on a silver platter." That would have been awesome.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 04:43 pm (UTC)Even if they had said which companies were going to make billions of the war chances are most people would not have been able to afford a significant amount of stock anyway. So, it still would not have benefited us.
Re: The perfect financial plan :)
Date: 2008-03-10 09:04 pm (UTC)Why not buy a tiny amount of stock? Stock gains, unlike the income taxes, are not progressive. If the stock price doubles, it doubles for everyone who owns that stock.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 12:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 03:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 08:06 pm (UTC)Are you suggesting that the countries we can wage war against are those without natural resources, lest we be accused or fighting for profit?
If we wanted to get cheap oil for our oil companies, it would have been far cheaper to lift the sanctions off of Saddam and just bought the oil from him.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 03:06 am (UTC)Do you have information on which companies now have access to oil in Iraq?
no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 03:54 pm (UTC)More war, more profit if you get it right.
Now why did you chaps persuade us to divest ourselves of our Empire again?
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 04:25 pm (UTC)The perfect financial plan :)
Date: 2008-03-10 04:41 pm (UTC)Re: The perfect financial plan :)
Date: 2008-03-10 05:15 pm (UTC)You've spent trillions on this. And will be paying off the loans for years to come. We only finished paying you chaps our lend-lease loans from WWII in the new Millennium. I quote from wiki:
The final payment of $83.3 million (£42.5 million) due on 31 December 2006 (repayment having been deferred on several occasions) was made on 29 December 2006, it being the last working day of the year. After this final payment Britain's Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, formally thanked the US for its wartime support.
Now you guys aren't as fucked as we were, but in the competition against China and India, you've just given yourselves a damn big handicap.
The problem is the US will have to undergo restructuring to compete anyway. If you'd retained the financial cushion to soften the restructuring much social hardship and unrest could have been avoided. As is, if History is anything to go by, you shall reap as you've sown, alas, but that's just economics.
I make a bad Cassandra, and I hope I'm wrong.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 03:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 07:34 pm (UTC)It's a simple three-card-trick:
Find the lady....
One day folk will get it. All it needs is hope.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 08:02 pm (UTC)The military industrial complex cares about the Defense Budget, not our wars, which are paid for with supplementals.
Nothing expensive is being destroyed in Iraq or Afghanistan. We're not going to buy more aircraft carriers because of those wars. We're not going to order more F-22s. We might want to get the F-35s built faster as our older jets get worn out, but we're not going to need more than the original allotment.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 09:37 pm (UTC)True, but what have we gained? Democracy for the surviving Iraqis? Better infrastructure? Higher standard of living? Better relations with the West? The possible destabilisation of Turkey? The everlasting gratitude of the Sunnis?
Iraqis have got nothing out of it, excepting a nominal freedom to die from internal conflict. The US has nothing out of it, baring some dead heroes and a worldwide rep for a certain kind of behaviour. But Halliburton definitely has got something from the conflict.
Check who the winners are.
I have no quibble with Afghanistan, but Iraq was insanity first to last.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 10:06 pm (UTC)And guess what, we're winning the war against Al Qaeda in an Arab country. We couldn't do that in Afghanistan, because when we went to fight them there, they left. Al Qaeda is an Arab-dominated organization, and the Arabs (especially Sunni Arabs) don't give two shits about anyone else on the planet who isn't an (Sunni) Arab.
So we had to fight them in an Arab country. Which one? Well, if we were going to invade a country, why not invade the one we'd been at war with for the previous 12 years?
The invasion of Iraq was a no-brainer. The only mistake that was made was a complete disinterest by the Administration in the process of building post-war Iraq into a functioning country.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 10:28 pm (UTC)No truer words have ever been typed. Kinda like when I had unprotected sex with that heroine-addicted Haitian prostitute - that kind of no-brainer.
And, of course, George W. Bush is the no-brainer poster child. Without him as the Chief Sales Officer we could have never pulled off such a collosal no-brainer.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 10:54 pm (UTC)If Bill Clinton spent 8 years bombing Iraq, why was it any stretch for Bush to actually finish the job that had been left to him?
no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 03:06 am (UTC)Seriously, though, I personally feel Iraq was a huge blunder. In my opinion, we should go to war if someone attacks us or we're 100% goddamn balls-on sure we're in imminent danger. Afganistan was totally cool - they harbored the people who attacked us. Iraq: they didn't attack us and they were not an imminent threat. Before we went in I said, we better know exactly what they have and where it is. Turns out we didn't. For me, that's a no-brainer.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-12 07:56 am (UTC)The only blunder was that the American government didn't know how to transform a military victory into a peaceful victory.
I mean, are you really suggesting that we should have waited for Saddam's next crime against humanity before we took him out?
What are the standards for "taking them out"?
Date: 2008-03-13 01:48 am (UTC)We musn't wait for Kim Jong Il to commit his next crime against humanity! We must take him out!
We musn't wait for Hugo Chávez to commit his next crime against humanity! We must take him out!
Re: What are the standards for "taking them out"?
Date: 2008-03-13 02:01 am (UTC)Eh, they're figuring things out for themselves and are getting with the program.
We musn't wait for Kim Jong Il to commit his next crime against humanity! We must take him out!
Probably. The Chinese will probably end up helping.
We musn't wait for Hugo Chávez to commit his next crime against humanity! We must take him out!
Oh, I think he's doing a good enough job trying to get himself overthrown as it is.
Of course, I think you'll have one hell of a time demonstrating how taking out any of those guys will help transform the Muslim world...
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 11:59 pm (UTC)Rather than taking a bigger slice of the terrorist 'pie' for themselves, I thought they had just made the pie that much bigger. I'm trying to think of Iraqi sponsored terrorism post Gulf War I, ouside the Palestinians (which almost all Arab nations support in some way or other). And since Gulf War I the Iraqis had directed no terror at America that we know of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_timeline
The Council of Foreign Relations has a slightly different view, but even it (despite being non-partisan it is still stuffed with Government officials) has difficulty in making a realistic link between Al Qaeda and Saddam:
http://www.cfr.org/publication/7702/
The invasion of Iraq meant we could not, after 9/11, concentrate our forces in Afghanistan. Split forces, an unnecessary second front and two bad jobs rather than one done well.
We'd already all piled into Afghanistan with you guys. The whole world was waiting to help you clear that one up and sort it out once and for good. Russia and China were onside. NATO members were queuing up to send troops and supplies.
But someone wanted Iraq. Yes, it was a no-brainer: there we are in agreement entirely.
All that goodwill wasted. And at such a cost. And for so little return: after all, we still ain't caught Osama six years on.
I don't know what sort of success that is.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 12:50 am (UTC)So given a need to motivate our Arab friends (and to get those nations in the region we weren't getting along with on the right track), we took out Saddam. That meant that Qaddafi (and apparently the Iranians) gave up their nuclear weapons programs. The Saudis got serious about the Al Qaeda fighters and supporters in their midst and pretty much every hothead in the Arab world showed up in Iraq where we killed them.
Al Qaeda has failed, because it killed too many innocent people and offered them only an incredibly strict and brutal life, which the Iraqis weren't eager to adopt.
Afghanistan remains important, but after December 2001 it wasn't a central front of the war.
We'd already all piled into Afghanistan with you guys. The whole world was waiting to help you clear that one up and sort it out once and for good. Russia and China were onside. NATO members were queuing up to send troops and supplies.
Sure, but what were they really going to do? Aside from the Brits, Aussies and Canadians, who else is really going to give us much support in Afghanistan?
I mean, the Germans are there as long as they won't get shot at and don't have to fight. Most of the other Europeans are just as useless. They possess neither the military budgets nor the quality of troops necessary for a tough fight in the Hindu Kush mountains. The Brits and Canadians are getting very irritated that they're the ones who have to bear most of the NATO burden.
So basically, you'd rather have us devote all of our efforts to Afghanistan, where our main enemies had already left and all of our more useless allies were willing to cheer us on because they weren't very interesting at putting their own soldiers at risk.
All that goodwill wasted.
That goodwill was a waste anyway. I mean, it was fueled by a massive loss of American life. Once we went out and started killing the people who did it, that goodwill started to deteriorate. Then, when we set out to fix the root of the problem, it evaporated. Utterly useless, unless we Americans feel like sacrificing our citizens to Al Qaeda every few years in the interest of having the worlds sympathy.
I mean, do you know what all the world's sympathy and goodwill will get you?
Darfur.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 10:47 am (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda_in_Iraq
And when they move from Iraq it will probably be to Saudi or dispersed throughout the Arab world. Iraq is both recruiting poster and training ground. So is Afghanistan, but I regard that as a different matter.
Iraqi has nothing to do with 9/11, and the goodwill didn't stop until other nations realised that the US and UK were going into Iraq whatever.
In some respects I'd finish the job properly in Afghanistan for structural reasons, but given that even in the 21st century every single major power has failed to cope with Afghanistan I'd rather not be there at all. Nevertheless the alliance was right to run Osama to ground and then try to bring him to bear.
I disagree about motivating our Arab chums: we're in danger of driving them into the arms of the Chinese or Russians, both of whom are beginning to flex their muscles in the post Iraqi-War world. Our strategic alliance with India has also meant that Pakistan has close contacts with China. Iran has close ties with Russia.
Given what we've spent for what we've got, we have to start realising that any war is hugely uneconomic: in fact a war is a good way to go from a balance of payments surplus to the largest deficit in history in the space of some seven years.
I think it would be sensible to only fight necessary wars. The holding pattern we had Saddam contained within wasn't broken. There were no WMD's and everyone knew it.
Three trillion dollars to show the Arab chaps what big dicks we have is frankly the height of ludicrous hubris. If I were in Halliburton I would have shovelled as much of the money in my direction too.
I'm coming to the conclusion that if you have a dairy herd, you might as well milk them.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 02:36 am (UTC)Huh?
I suppose, building tanks, for a profit, is reasonable. But if you are suggesting it is okay to shoot people, blow up homes and businesses, and generally disrupt society, just to make some quick cash, I think people are mostly opposed.
I must have been trolled.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 10:08 pm (UTC)The camouflage worn by those troops was worn in Desert Storm, not in OIF.
So is it supposed to suggest that the artist is making a comment about 1991?
no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 11:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 11:09 pm (UTC)I can't wait to be an old, rich, white man enriched by war.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-17 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-12 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-13 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-13 04:29 pm (UTC)From what I can see, Iraq is exporting oil right now with no serious problems:
"Production last year cracked the 2 million barrel per day average and is now regularly above it. Exports have followed suit, a boon to Iraq in times of even higher oil prices."
http://www.upi.com/International_Security/Energy/Analysis/2008/03/12/analysis_pentagon_iraq_oil_laws_stuck/4461/
This means the oil could be exported safely from Iraq. So, since we have the military might to take it, and the war was just for the oil, why havn't the US forces taken the oil yet?
no subject
Date: 2008-03-13 06:15 pm (UTC)