Reading notes

I submit that the human costs of Bush’s War have been incalculable, the monetary costs exorbitant and ongoing, and the benefit? — a net loss of stability in the Middle East and an increase in terrorism’s motivation and execution. Katrina puts numbers to my submission:

Now more than at any time since Bush invaded Iraq, journalists need to give Americans a clear assessment of the mounting costs of this war. This is a great opportunity for the media to redeem itself for malpractice in the run-up to war when, as Washington Post ombudsperson Michael Getler wrote this month in a tough rebuke to his own paper—-and the larger media world, “…the press, as a whole, did not do a very good job in challenging administration claims…Too many public events in which alternative views were expressed…were either missed, underreported or poorly displayed.” …

In human terms, seven hundred US servicemen and women have died since Bush declared “the end of major combat” in his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech in May 2003, while more than 5,000 soldiers have been wounded since the war began. Many of them, as Michael Moore documents in his provocative new film Fahrenheit 911, have lost arms and legs.The cost to the Iraqi people has also been tragic. Up to 11,317 Iraqi civilians have died in the conflict so far—many of them children whose only crime was to be caught living in the middle of a war zone.

In financial terms, the costs to the American taxpayer are massive. The US has already spent $126 billion on the war, costing every American family approximately $3,400 each.

IOW, if your family’s “Bush tax relief” was less than $3,400, well then, you’re in the red. And it’s all credit-card debt; we have not yet begun to pay.