The Surge and the Cost

Senator John McCain likes to boast that the surge in Iraq is working. As the cost of the war continues to pull down our national economy, the surge of troops only proves that the war is not a sink hole yet. But the drain upon national resources and public morale cannot be measured.

How can our leaders lead us down this perilous path and then sit back and watch us sink into recession, if not worse? Let former Texas senator Phil Graham tell it, we are all a nation of whiners and crybabies.

But I remember something Jesus said about a king going to war and sitting down and counting up the cost. When I reread Luke 14:28-31, I find an example of a builder who did not count up the cost And, what he built he left unfinished.

Somebody did not sit down and count up the cost of this war. Wasn’t it former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who predicted that the cost of the war would run $50 billion?

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and self-described opponent of the war, puts the final figure at a staggering $1 trillion to $2 trillion, including $500 billion for the war and occupation and up to $300 billion in future health care costs for wounded troops. Additional costs include a negative impact from the rising cost of oil and added interest on the national debt.

We have poured in 130,000 troops, many of whom have repeated rotations since the war started in 2003. Over 4,000 casualties and hundreds of thousand wounded.

The cost of war is the soul of a nation.

We are now guilty ourselves of inhumane acts against our enemies, including murder, arbitrary imprisonment, and torture.

The surge is working, but not in the right direction. We have created more enemies in the world, than we have friends, and our friends have abandoned us slowly. This is a U.S. invasion, not a NATO invasion. So called allies were relegated to a stick figure role in the conflict. We are out here, and at it, all alone, imbued in a stew of self-righteousness.

The outgoing Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush sat down and counted up what cost before he invaded Iraq?

A bird told him in his ear that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction… a wrong calculation. Then the American public was misinformed that Iraq supported al-Qaeda, which would imply that Saddam Hussein was in collusion with Osama bin Laden… wrong again.

This premise of base assumptions for going to war was wrong. Therefore, if the premise is wrong, how can you reach a right conclusion? There it is, simple stupid logic: Premise plus Argument upon Argument upon Argument leads to wrong Conclusion when the Premise is fabricated and faulty.

Some say, however, that the US was after Iraqi oil. The Iraqi pipeline and infrastructure became a high risk investment for somebody, especially considering the internal dispute over who would have power over the oil. Defending this investment has been the total cost of this war so far, a cost not calculated.

After all, the war was supposed to be over quickly, but western machines and vehicles endured constant sand damage, pipelines were blown up by militants, villagers were terrorized, caught betwixt and between insurgent and invaders. Thus began the mass exodus out of the country.

The U. S. attempt to install a new government turned sour. The people did not want a puppet regime like the late Shah of Iran, the last monarch and western puppet, nicknamed “king of kings” because of his vast wealth holding. However, the shah and his western friends were deposed in the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Eventually, the Shah of Iran wondered from country to country, with a horde of the Iranian treasury in tow. Finally, he wounded up in the U.S. under a medical umbrella provided by President Jimmy Carter. The Iranian people protested and took American hostages. The U.S. has been barred from reentering Iran since.

NOW, President George W. Bush is not the greatest military strategist in the world. In military IQ, he would have been dead last for the SNAFU in Iraq.

One would think George would have learned something from Texas history about General Sam Houston, and how he enticed General Santa Anna and his Mexican army deeper and deeper into the wilderness of Texas, far north of the Rio Grande, far away from its supply lines. Then he doubled back and caught the Mexicans napping.

Why were they napping on the battlefield? The large and highly trained Mexican army was literally invincible. Remember the Alamo massacre.

But Santa Anna was overconfident against a little rag-tag bunch of rebels. They never expected Sam Houston to double back on them.

By the same token, we, the American public, never expected an Iraqi insurgency would arise and sustain itself. In the eyes of our Commander-in-Chief, this must have looked like a little rag-tag army.

What part of the Arab language does King George not understand? Jihad means fight to the death of the last man.