stats and other fun facts about the war in Iraq

Minus my piqued commentary, the following comes largely from monopoly media sources, which is to say that there may well be snippets of the truth to be found therein.

What was promoted at the outset as the coalition of the willing has during the recent year been reduced to the coalition of the shilling. Britain and their dear Harry have been the most prominent among those originally numbering among the willing who have recently found the good graces to get the H out of Iraq... or what devout hawks characterize as cut and run. It seems reasonable to expect that while they were still on site, members of the willing coalition had been paying some if not most of their own cost of admission. This calls into question the entire situation surrounding that which has been promoted as the surge. Even without the suits at the pentagon making grand effort at selling such to the American public as though it was the latest stratagem of war phlegm it just coughed up - something they are well paid to do in the first place, the U.S. plainly had enough motivation of it's own volition for greatly increasing the number of its own bodies being poured onto this fire just to maintain it's own sorry sense of whatever it is that constitutes a sense of balance in this ongoing war.

The Congressional Research Service indicates that by present methods of estimate, it costs $390,000 per year for each U.S. soldier deployed in that war theater - Iraq. While that does not even rise to the level of minimum wage of the average professional athlete, and even under these times of woefully depressed economy, $400K per anum is nothing to sneeze at. That kind of stat really piques the overall impression I get after a peek at all this kind of financial reporting over war stuff. A cost being incurred implies a transaction - at a minimum a simple two-way transaction, has occurred between those spending and those in receipt. How much of that booty, per U.S. soldier, is being pocketed by the U.S. Soldier; who, and more likely what entity, is pocketing the balance?

This publicly-reported financials of war stuff do not add up very well nor very consistently, but this is just my view of it, one that has been maintained mostly without relying on a plug into a teet of the monopoly media apparatus the past 39 months. Just roughly estimating from this view based upon the series of MSM headlines I recall seeing or hearing tell of the past 5 years and running, the total is already over a trillion just in what the headlines said that the president asked for, or what congress approved, or some combination therein, over, and over, repeat, for 60 months and running. Meanwhile, some sources within the media apparatus have conservatively pegged the total cost ongoing at a bit over $500 billion by way of utilizing a constantly incrementing clock (see below) that is not unlike the tabulations kept for the national debt. Other less conservative sources say the figure is closer to $800 billion ..... a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon this begins to add up to real money. The same question as asked on behalf of the U.S. soldier applies. No matter which one of these figures is actually closer to the truth, if all these billions are being spend, somewhere there is an entity pocketing the same. Who or what is it? Who knows? From Brookings Institute here, non-partisan CBO there....CBS ..... CNN ..... MSNBC.....ABC...... pretty soon this news reported by way of a monopoly apparatus about the war[s] might begin to add up to some real truth. While were at it, on a good day, what, pray tell, is a non-partisan CBO? Back to the mighty task of figuring these war figures, some sources provide a much more condensed and restricted view of this total cost stuff, having arrived at pegging the number based on a monthly figure of $12 billion that is itself premised on estimations calculated by present standards - 2008. Meanwhile, other sources appear to be doing a bang-up job avoiding direct confrontation with reporting actual total costs of this war, which they say is actually, at least, 3 wars ongoing all a the same time, by introducing all manner of dizzying projections for what the war might cost over various picked dates and then estimating forward towards other, various and seemingly random dates in the future.

Rumor has it that prior to the official outset in earnest of this war on Iraq, the White House by way of its then economic adviser , pegged the cost of the entire war from start to finish at $100 billion to $200 billion, but then, supposedly, the reporting of this number to the public did not sit well with those with their hands on the strings attached to the administration, so they went about and got themselves a new economic adviser who then pegged the estimate for the entire war to cost $50 billion to $60 billion. The same source of rumor quoted the collective administration therein: "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." – Wolfowitz, March 28, 2003. Lookback, not to be confused, necessarily, with blowback, is a term of endearment from the lexicon of golf. The concept is, after having completed a given cycle of marching forth from tee to green, before progressing on to do battle over the scene of the next cycle of operation in the circuit, turn around and gaze for a moment to have a look-see, smell the roses, from the reverse perspective of the grounds trampled upon only moments prior. The concept is, that theater of operation truly designed with utmost care & expertise is one in which the reverse look, at least at times, may well provide as much beauty and grandeur as the forward-looking view.