What PRICE, What FUTURE?

If you look, my fellow ZEN'ers, to the right-side column, somewhere over there >>>>

You see the 'Cost of the Iraqi War' statistics.

I wrote this harshly-titled column, "IS America a LIE?", which included this quote:

Yet! External costs DO NOT EXIST, per se (I believe that external benefits DO EXIST, btw): every planetary decision bears a pricetag, and that pricetag may be sometimes too high.

Your factory pollutes: external cost?
Your car burns MY future food-processing and transportation processes: external cost?
Your ARMY kills my neighbors: external cost?

But there are no EXTERNAL COSTS. There are present costs, and FUTURE COSTS.

You would, perhaps, understand that the fact of 'war costs' is not simply 'US taxpayer costs'.

Other costs, those soi-disant 'external costs', can be traceable to the actions of the 'internal costs' reflected beyond the scope of that measure.

What?

So if we have 'spent', in US dollars, some 450 billion (any day now, by that link above), and we do NOT factor in:

- the long-range medical care costs for returning veterans;
- the long-range criminal costs, by-product of anticipated under-treatment of the recurring and severe mental problems afflicting some of those returning soldiers;
- the long-range costs of the debt-burden joyously awarded to We, THE PEOPLE by a deranged and power-mad Republican 'War on Terruh' Congress (now in the hands of Democrats: as yet no different, nor is the prognosis good)...

And we should factor these, of a non-exhausted list of 'External Costs', into the basis of our country's financial future.

BUT! Iraq?

The 'Arab Street'?

The Islamic world population? Is any American looking down the road thirty years? Wait, friends, let's discuss five or ten years down that road.

In 2012, what will Iraq be? A second Somalia, a lost country under UN protection? An Afghanistan? A West Iran, or East Saudi Arabia? Kurdistan? Ask your friends: I surely cannot conceive of the means whereby Iraq will dust itself off, thank us so very much for providing so much RECONSTRUCTION to achieve.

In 2017, will Iraq emerge, as did Vietnam eventually, to rejoin the World Community on its joyously global capitalistic movement into global apocalyptic climate change? External costs... summed up by Dahr Jamail's recent email column which provided Ali al-Fadhily's column at IPS:

"It is clear now that any Iraqi who refuses to serve the American plan is considered an enemy of the United States," a community leader in the city who did not want to give his name told IPS.

He said some people are angrier with other leaders supporting the U.S. forces. "The whole world is responsible for these murders, and a day will come that we say to the world, 'you supported Americans who killed us'."

A man wearing a mask, who appeared to be a resistance fighter, spoke with IPS just outside Baquba on condition of anonymity.

"Hundreds were killed and thousands evicted from the city while the so-called al-Qaeda fighters survived," he said. "Americans must be told that we will never stop killing their sons who came to kill us unless they leave our country in peace."

I regret sharing "the horror, the horror" with you all, but standing by, while good men do bad things, standing by, while War Criminals do HORRIBLE things, cannot stay my voice... and yours.

Think of the costs!!!


COURAGE ...

ç*””*”*”*ç*””* ZENmud *””*ç*”*”*””*ç