America’s Superpower Days Are Over

January 20th, 2006 at 18:53 Björn Hallberg

One can only hope that the pessimists are right for once.

Paul Craig Roberts - Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes have calculated the cost to Americans of Bush’s Iraq war to be between one and two trillion dollars. This figure is 5 to 10 times higher than the $200 billion that Bush’s economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, estimated. Lindsey was fired by Bush, because Lindsey’s estimate was three times higher than the $70 billion figure that the Bush administration used to mislead Congress and the American voters about the burden of the war. You can’t work in the Bush administration unless you are willing to lie for dub-ya.

Americans need to ask themselves if the White House is in competent hands when a $70 billion war becomes a $2 trillion war. Bush sold his war by understating its cost by a factor of 28.57. Any financial officer any where in the world whose project was 2,857 percent over budget would instantly be fired for utter incompetence.

And perhaps more importantly still, beyond thinking that all of this will go away with a change of political leadership, Americans need to not only scrutinize the bill but ask themselves what the ulterior motives may have been, even beyond the usual suspects of oil and Israel. Because as it turns out, the American people have paid indirectly to have their nation turned into a police state. And that is saying a lot about a nation that already before George B Bush was suffering from severe militarism and nationalistic confusion.

Entry 422 filed under: North America. This entry was posted 2 years, 11 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.