[antimedia] antimedia: Here's another mailbag item....

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Posted by antimedia:
Here's another mailbag item....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1175977854.shtml


   ....from a friend.

     I have been to Ramadi on a number of occasions and it is becoming a
     success story you will never hear about on American NEWS. The
     tribes throughout the Al Anbar province are starting to rid the
     region of the terrorists and are very effective at it. There is no
     civil war in the fashion of our civil war, but simply Shiites
     running Sunnis out of their neighborhoods, they do this by killing
     enough of them that others will leave. The terrorists/insurgents
     are not an effective fighting force and have no hope in ever
     defeating us militarily. They set bombs along road ways and kill
     the occasional soldier.
     They do have an effective IO campaign through our media which seems
     to be more than willing to be their useful idiots.
     I have been in the Al Anbar region for 6 months and have yet to see
     a reporter. I was also in Baghdad and visited the Al Rashid Hotel
     and there were no reporters there either. I don't know where they
     get their information on what is happening over here. I haven't
     seen a substantive news story about the actual situation on the
     ground since I've been here. I guess they have resorted to
     reporting nothing but nightly body counts and if no Americans were
     killed they report Iraqi body counts.
     It would be interesting for American news outlets to report body
     counts from American cities for just one week. I can guarantee you
     it will be higher than over here. I read there were 7 killed over
     the weekend in New Orleans, I guess by American media logic the
     police should pull out and admit defeat, they are obviously in a
     quagmire with no hope of victory. Anyway, I could go on forever
     about the nitwittery of our media, but nothing would change, they
     are who they are.
     Have you ever noticed the loudest critics of war never actually
     fight in the war?

   We constantly hear the whining from the war critics and the media that
   the Iraq war costs too much -- too many lives, too much money. By
   [1]way of comparison, some 407,000 military personnel died in the four
   years of WWII, or almost 80,000 per year. About 34,000 died in the
   Korean war or nearly 11,000 per year. About 56,000 died in Vietnam --
   about 6,000 per year.
   Our losses in Iraq? Less than 850 per year.
   What about dollar costs though? Headlines constantly scream about the
   billions of dollars that the Iraq war is costing.
   In historical terms, the Iraq war is [2]dirt cheap.

     After four years, America's cost for the war in Iraq has reached
     nearly $500 billion _ more than the total for the Korean War and
     nearly as much as 12 years in Vietnam, adjusting for inflation. The
     ultimate cost could reach $1 trillion or more.
     A lot of money? No question.
     But even though the war has turned out to be much more expensive
     than Bush administration officials predicted on the eve of the
     March 2003 invasion, it is relatively affordable _ at least in
     historical terms.
     Iraq eats up less than 1 percent of the nation's gross domestic
     product, compared with as much as 14 percent for Vietnam and 9
     percent for Korea.
     ``I think it's hard to argue it's not affordable,'' said Steven M.
     Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and
     Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank in Washington, D.C.

   The problem with Americans today is we have no historical perspective,
   no patience for anything that takes more than a few days and no
   accurate knowledge of what is going on in the world. We are fed pablum
   by a biased media that has no interest in the truth and led by
   politicians who are more concerned with personal power and wealth than
   the future of this nation.
   If we manage to hold on until Iraq is stable, we will have changed
   history forever at a cost so minimal (in historical terms) as to be
   laughable, and yet even with that possibility tantalizingly in reach,
   we are seriously considering giving up. We are a country adrift,
   without a sense of purpose, without a moral compass and consumed by
   materialism and greed.
   Our forefathers must be very proud.

References

   1. http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm
   2. http://goldsea.com/Asiagate/703/17war.html