We’re Paying for What, Now?

We find perspective on Iraq War costs over at xinjo.com, where they have some breathtaking visualizations of how much we’ve spent on this insanity.

Ever visualized $87 billion, the amount President Bush announced on national television that he was going to ask the Congress to grant him to continue the fight on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush asked for this money on September 7th, 2003, for the fiscal year, beginning October 1, 2004. Since before then, to the end of September, 2007, the United States has dedicated approximately $315 billion dollars to the cause.

Those specks at the bottom are a person and a car. Keep this perspective in mind.

What is that money going for?

Oct. 15, 2007 issue – The colonel was furious. “Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers.” He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company. Asked to address this and other allegations in this story, Blackwater spokesperson Anne Tyrrell said, “This type of gossip has led to many soap operas in the press.”

Gossip and soap opera, folks. Our own tax money is going to pay terrorists in Iraq who turn their weapons on our own troops. It’s all just a gossipy soap opera.

In a great commentary at DailyKos, DhinMI points out that

A lot of the Blackwater mercenaries are former special forces, or at least people who went through training for elite units. They were given much better training than military police soldiers. But then they left the military, and instead of investing more in recruiting, training and retaining elite military police, we train special forces, lose them to the private sector, then pay exorbitant amounts of money to train their replacements in special forces, then pay private contractors exorbitant amounts of money to have the elite soldiers trained by the military used as MP’s because we don’t put as high a premium on training and retaining elite MP’s. It’s an ultimate penny wise/pound foolish approach, and it’s costing taxpayers a bundle.

I can’t imagine this would be an engineered situation designed to enrichen a select few at the expense of the great many taxpayers, would it? It’s not like Blackwater has financial ties to the Bush administration! To suggest as much might be treasonous!

From 2001 to 2007, the firm has increased its annual federal contracts from less than $1 million to more than $500 million, all while employees passed through a turnstile between Blackwater and the administration, several leaving important posts in the Pentagon and the CIA to take jobs at the security company.

[Erik] Prince… founded Blackwater in 1996… His late father was instrumental in the creation of the Family Research Council, one of the right-wing Christian groups most influential with the George W. Bush administration. At his funeral in 1995, he was eulogized by two stalwarts of the Christian conservative movement, James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Edgar Prince’s widow, Elsa, who remarried after her husband’s death, has served on the boards of the FRC and another influential Christian-right organization, Dobson’s Focus on the Family. She currently runs the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where, according to IRS filings, her son Erik is a vice president. The foundation has given lavishly to some of the marquee names of the Christian right. Between July 2003 and July 2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the FRC and $531,000 to Focus on the Family.

Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian conservative organization whose meetings have been attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer, and whose membership is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Dobson. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation gave the CNP $80,000 between July 2003 and July 2006.

But there’s no way the administration would permit such open and obvious corruption, is there!? And if they did, for violating the Geneva convention, committing high crimes and misdemeanors, and violating every right enumerated in the Bill of Rights, wouldn’t impeachment be on the table? Wouldn’t it be the first thing on the agenda?

Oh. Pity. I thought we had a representative democratic republic, not a tin-pot dictatorship with a boy emperor who makes and breaks laws as it suits him. I thought this was a nation of, for, and by the people, not just of, for, and by some people.

Can you even tell the different anymore? Does anyone even care?