"Iraq for Sale"

[6thGen]

I think there are going to be a very large number of people in the upper echelon of the pentagon who will in the future years, try to purge their ever increasing guilt, cowardice and conscience by writing pathetic tell all memoirs/books, giving interviews, etc... about how they were misled, misinformed, not listened to, ignored, etc, etc.. and blah blah blah, because so many of them will feel great great shame at having so easily rolled over and betrayed their own beliefs for the likes of the bullies like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. And they will have to, for the rest of their lives, live with the cold reality that their lack of character and weakness will have led to men and women dying needlessly.

That's already happened, and will continue to happen. But it wasn't from a "needless" war.

 

[Smiling JOe]

You make a point if she was a reservist. However, she still receives a tax free income over there, a significant bump in pay, and wartime income. I understand your frustration with the work it takes to receive extra pay or lower interest rates, but that’s a problem with the functioning of the incentives. The incentives are still there. Blame bureaucracy and push for a smaller government.

Either that trailer mentions that she is in the reserves, or the movie did. We don't know what job she holds/held back home. She could be a surgeon, making good money(don't start talking about the liability insurance costs -- just an example), so we don't know that she isn't taking a major cut, even with the extra benefits and war pay. We have nothing more than her word, and to debate that would not have any merit. I imagine a significant bump in pay for a reservist, would still not be much, and wouldn't equate to the salaries of the private contractors over there.

One of the problems with the private contractors doing the jobs that historically, the military itself did, is that now, the military is busy guarding the private sector doing the jobs, instead of the military doing the job. I think the intent was that the military could use that personal to fight. As it is, Americans are paying enormous amounts for the private sector to do the jobs, plus they are paying for the military to guard those people, rather than just paying the military to do the jobs. The film also points out that the private contractors, since being paid Cost-Plus, have no problem buying $80,000, and blowing them up when a tire goes flat. Rather than buying spare tires, they buy new trucks. It also points out examples of wrong products being ordered by the private contractors, and rather than returning them, they throw them into a garbage pile and incinerate them, buying new correct replacements. The film makers state that more than one billion dollars was over-billed by Halliburton. That was the over-billing, not the ludicrous stuff like replacing trucks rather than tires.

It is sickening, the waste. You want to know why the far Right doesn't like Bush, look no farther than the massive unbridled spending. The problem as I see it is that the Congress fully backs the spending, and not only do they back it, they throw in much more pork, as long as people feel free to spend and can hide it in the guise of "emergency war spending." They should all be held responsible for their actions! Damn politrics!

 

[Chickpea]

That's already happened, and will continue to happen. But it wasn't from a "needless" war.

Let's agree to disagree on this shall we? IMHO, this war has bordered on the criminal and if this had not been the US that had instigated this, they (the US) would have cried foul and hauled the leader of offending nation to International Court and tried as War criminal.