As of 7/9/2008 the cost of the Iraq War has exceeded $535 trillion. According to <a href=”http://www.nationalpriorities.org”>Nationalpriorities.org that comes down to more than $5,800 per household, $2,147 per person. This amounts to more than $300 million per day.

To put that in perspective, taxpayers in the city of Chicago, having spent $6.9 billion on the war so far, could have paid the salaries for more than 100,000 elementary school teachers for a year. They could have provided scholarships for more than 650,000 university students for one year. Or they could have provided every person in the city health care for one year.

read comments (0)

(Niall )Ferguson sees turmoil possibly spreading through the Middle East as religious and ethnic groups finally sort themselves out, almost a century after Turkey’s vast Ottoman Empire broke apart at World War I’s end and the British and French rearranged the pieces to suit their interests.

In his classic study of those times, “A Peace to End All Peace,” Boston University’s Fromkin quoted an American missionary who warned the British in Baghdad against tying Arab and Kurdish provinces, Sunni and Shiite provinces together: “You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity!”

Source.

read comments (0)

The bombings, in a crowded market, were among the most deadly attacks since last fall’s bombings in Sadr City killing 144 people.

From NYTimes.com.

read comments (0)

Coalition forces have recently captured a documents in an unsurgent safehouse that indicate plans to attack inside the United States using a simlilar strategy to gain entry to the country that the 911 attackers used - student visas.

read comments (0)

ABC has just released a story saying that the surge in troop numbers that Bush is expected is already underway.

ABC News has learned that the “surge” Bush is expected to announce in a prime time speech tonight has already begun. Ninety advance troops from the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in Baghdad Wednesday.

An additional battalion of roughly 800 troops from the same division are expected to arrive in Baghdad Thursday. Eighty percent of the sectarian violence occurs within a 30-mile radius of Baghdad, so that is where most of the additional troops will be concentrated.

Source.

read comments (0)

Some Army recruiter quotes from an ABC News undercover investigation:

“Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?” one student asks a recruiter.

“No, we’re bringing people back,” he replies.

“We’re not at war. War ended a long time ago,” another recruiter says.

Last year, the Army suspended recruiting nationwide to retrain recruiters following hundreds of allegations of improprieties.

One Colorado student taped a recruiting session posing as a drug-addicted dropout.

“You mean I’m not going to get in trouble?” the student asked.

The recruiters told him no, and helped him cheat to sign up.

Source.

read comments (0)

Condoleeza Rice visited Iraq on Thursday and, wearing a flak jacket and surrounded by armed guards, declared Iraq as ‘making progress’.

Upon coming into Baghdad from the air, her plane was forced to circle for 40 minutes until the gunfire or mortar rounds abated.

She then took a helicopter from the airport into the city to avoid the dangerous “explosive-strewn” highway to Baghdad.

Then electricity went out during her meeting with President Talabani - the conversation was continued in the dark.

Here’s more.

read comments (0)

“A 150,000-strong private security force, raised and trained by the US, is linked to the murderous death squads stalking Iraq, the country’s Interior Minister claimed yesterday.”

More from the Independent.

read comments (0)

Once again - US media not publishing info the rest of the world knows and understands:
Tom Engelhardt on US building permanent military bases in Iraq

read comments (0)

A rather frightening account of an weapons market in the Iraqi newspapaer Azzaman (Arabic for ‘The Times’).

Qurna is northwest of Basra.
Qurna Weapons Smuggling

read comments (0)