From Newsweek International, edited by Fareed Zakaria (host of a PBS international news show):
Report: U.S. accounts for nearly half of $1 trillion expenditure
For the first time since the Cold War, global military spending exceeded $1 trillion in 2004, nearly half of it by the United States, a prominent European think tank said Tuesday.
Explain those numbers to Minn. state senator Becky Lourey “whose son died in Iraq two weeks ago when his helicopter was brought down” and who opposed the Iraq war. In a poignant June 6 DN! interview, Sen. Lourey says:
Below, more on the insanely spiraling costs of Iraq, and Sen. Lourey’s attempt to talk straight with Rumsfeld:
“As the Pentagon’s tab for the ongoing occupation continues to accumulate, the costs to the people, environment and cultural heritage of Iraq have spiraled beyond any sense of reckoning,” NewStandardNews today{
As extensive as the military costs are, the full human, economic, cultural and ecological costs of the Iraq war – including the damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure and health care system, the destruction of antiquities and looting of cultural landmarks, and widespread environmental degradation – remain largely unknown but appear to be mounting.
The Pentagon and Congress have done little to assess such costs and have thus far earmarked far fewer funds for civilian reconstruction, economic development and environmental projects in Iraq than for military operations.
In October 2003, for example, the World Bank estimated that reconstruction alone would cost about $56 billion between 2004 and 2007. But, according to the CRS, Congress allocated only $21 billion for reconstruction in 2003 and 2004, and of that amount only about $6.7 billion has been disbursed. …
More from Sen. Lourey’s June 6 interview:
BECKY LOUREY: And so, I remember when I got up to the mic, I thought it was going to be Edgar Allen Poe and The Telltale Heart all over again. My heart was pounding so tremendously and I said to him, you know, the reports about Halliburton … had just come out, and how they were overcharging, and so I made the point that we were looking for money to help us with Medicare and Medicaid for our senior population. Where we could get the money was for them to stop giving no-bid contracts to a company like Halliburton … that has its headquarters in the Cayman Islands so it’s not even paying taxes in America. [T]he other thing that made me so angry is that Matt [her son] had written to me.
I remember him saying … Dick Cheney must be making money through Halliburton … and they had been sleeping in the sand with the sand fleas biting them because for weeks Halliburton hadn’t gotten the equipment out there that the soldiers needed. When Matt was in Bosnia, it wasn’t Halliburton, and the equipment was there.
AMY GOODMAN: Yeah. Looking at the transcript, you started off by saying that your son is flying helicopters in Baghdad, and Rumsfeld said, “Tell him thank you, we appreciate the service.” And then you said that “I must admit that I wrote a resolution in the Minnesota Senate against going to war unilaterally.”
And he said, “That’s why we went in with 32 other countries.” [Y]ou went on to say, you’re “very upset about the services to our servicemen that Halliburton is providing. Not only could we save a lot of money if they weren’t overcharging us as much as they are, but the services that they are providing now for our servicemen are not as efficient as, for instance, they were in Bosnia, when my son was in Bosnia and the army was responsible for that.”
So you said, “I hope you will really look into that, and it is great concern when our servicemen and women are over there, and an entity non-bid, such as Halliburton, is not doing the job that our own army had always done much better.”
And Rumsfeld responded … “In many places we have moved to private contractors, and they have done a very good job, and to the extent they don’t do a good job, they get let go as a contractor, and it gets changed.”
[H]e said, “Second, I’m not intimately knowledgeable about what you are talking about with respect to this particular company, but I was advised this morning that what’s going on, there was no overpayment to any company and, in fact, there is a fairly normal process going on where they submit bills from their subcontractors and from their own. It gets discussed and debated. We have got auditors that crawl all over these things,” he said.
BECKY LOUREY: I remember that he denied knowledge.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes. And then he said, “And what you are reading about in the paper is not an overpayment at all. It’s a disagreement between the United States and the government.” He said, “I’m not an expert. I shouldn’t be speaking about this, but my understanding is it may be a disagreement between the company and the Dept. of Defense … possibly between the company and the subcontractors, but there has not to my knowledge been any overpayment, and I wouldn’t want your comment to leave these good folks with a misimpression.”
[T]hen he said he was going to take another comment.
BECKY LOUREY: I remember thinking, he’s like a massive tree, and I’m just shoving my fist into the tree and getting nothing but scratches from the bark. I remember thinking how are we going to move away from this, you know, the whole way that he talks about morality, you know, freedom versus occupation.
How do we counter all of these things? [E]ven Kevin Phillips in his book, Wealth and Democracy, is talking about us living in a plutocracy … government for and by the wealthy, and the poor are unworthy. What better example than a non-bid contract to Halliburton? How do we even counter this? Because it’s not just all of the service people who are dying now, it is why they are dying, and what’s going to be happening, who are going to be our leaders. …
Sen. Lourey also speaks lovingly of her son, who died two weeks ago in Iraq. You can read or listen to the full interview. Her son will be buried on Friday at Arlington National Cemetery.