Reading commentary on the release of the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq, you get the impression that some people expected a report to end the civil war and are disappointed that it didn’t.
One interesting thing in the report is that apparently the US embassy in Baghdad has only six fluent Arabic speakers. Another is that the Iraq war is costing eight billion US dollars a month, with an eventual total cost of some two trillion dollars. At the risk of sounding completely insensitive to the plight of Iraqis under Saddam Hussein (I am not) I think I would rather have Saddam untoppled and that money would have been better spent on virtually any global problem such as global warming, food security, human, drugs, and arms traffic control, economic development in the Third World, AIDS, etc. Of course that might not have been as good for the bottom line of big business.
If you wage a global war against something like hunger, the money is still going somewhere, such as to food producers. In fact, I’m surprised drug companies don’t have any campaigns to try to get public support for immunization programs.
Or, as a radical idea, that money could have stayed in the pockets of the people who earned it instead of being pilfered from them. But, of course, if it isn’t stolen to spend on one useless and destructive project, it’ll be stolen to spend on another.
Incidentally, spare us the silly argument about this war being fought to line the pockets of big business. Government is so big and inscrutable that there are far easier and less risky ways of subsidising corporations.