Sami Jamil Jadallah: It Is Only $60 Billions, Nothing Honorable About It

If one is to look at facts on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, one can see the biggest international failures and fraud in US history. Not only did the military fail big time, but the rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan was a total disaster. The recent report, issued by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, released a few days ago, is an indictment of the failures of Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and the State, doing their job, and the mishandling of reconstruction, with over $60 Billions simply wasted. Add to this the over $90 Billions for reconstruction of Afghanistan, with Afghanistan looking worse now than before the invasion. This is not a few millions here, this is $60 Billions simply wasted. Add to this the over $90 Billion for reconstruction of Afghanistan, with Afghanistan looking worse now than before the invasion. This is not a few million here, this is $60 Billions, no small sum of money by any means. This report coincided with the BBC. The Guardian recent report of US military partnership and management of training sectarian militias, that simply killed, murdered and tortured Iraqis, engaging in systematic torture, that should have sent military commanders, including Pentagon officials right to the Hague. It seems the Pentagon of the Axis of Evil, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, could not do anything right. They enlisted was criminals, to manage the insurrections in post occupied Iraq, and invited a bunch of crooks to manage the reconstruction. The US action sowed the seeds of a corrupt, sectarian and criminal regime in Iraq, no different from that of the late Saddam Hussein. According to Bob Adelmann of the New Americans, the costs of the war, when officially ended on December 15, 2011, have cost American tax payers more than $800 billion in direct expenses, and another estimated $1 trillion in additional health costs, for those wounded in the war. Joseph Stiglitz, co author of the "The Three Trillion War" arrived at $3 trillion, as a conservative estimate. Every American citizen using a calculator, knows what $60 Billion can do for their community, for their state, and certainly for their cities. The US and for the last three decades, with some minor exceptions, is looking more and more like a third world country, corrupt, incompetent, with a government that is paralyzed by political ideologies, and a Congress beholding to foreign lobby and corporate interests, rather than taxpayers and constituents.