All Episodes
Previous Next
April 30, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:38
2371 Iraq - A Decade of Hell

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, presents a collection of information detailing the foundational lies, fraudulent claims, unaccountability, failure, environmental, economic and human costs of the Iraq War.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to my show!
I think it's worth having a look at some of the facts that you're being shielded from.
Generally, when you're within an empire, there's this sort of biosphere, this obsidian biosphere that keeps reality out, and the only thing that pierces it through is the occasional blowback, which causes self-pity and hysteria, because the provocations overseas are not particularly seen.
So let's look at some of the facts of what has occurred in Iraq over the past 10 years.
And really, for 10 years before that, there was a UK-US-led Blockade of some pretty essential medical supplies and food and other resources.
One thing to remember is that the population of Iraq is a little over 30 million, and the population of America is 313 million.
So roughly, it's a 10 to 1 thing.
So when we talk about the deaths of 5 million Iraqi children, we are, to translate it in American terms, we'll be talking about the deaths of 50 million American children.
And it's just really important to keep those perspectives in mind when we look at this data.
So, as a result of the coalition invasion, approximately 1.5 million Iraqis are dead.
This would be the equivalent of 15 million Americans killed as a result of an invasion.
The U.S. veterans in medical facilities, there are approximately 1,000 suicide attempts every month from these broken people.
18 suicides a day are completed.
320,000 veterans have brain injuries, which of course are hugely expensive and problematic.
Almost one in ten Iraqis have been displaced, which means they basically had to flee their homes, either as a result of radiation poisoning from the depleted uranium shells, or as a result of the general bombing of infrastructure, or as a result of the snipers, or as a result of...
Resistance forces, coalition forces, you name it.
No electricity, no plumbing, no hospitals.
They've had to leave.
And again, this is about 30 million Americans having to move as a result of war.
80% of the displaced are women and young children.
Let's look at the average Iraqi family.
The odds that a father has been killed are 1 in 11.
Odds that the mother is now the main breadwinner are 1 in 7.
Odds that the daughter has been or is malnourished before 2003 was 1 in 5.
Since 2007, 1 in 3.
Odds that the son has been exposed to a traumatic event in the past two years, 1 in 2.
One in two.
Now, if we look at the lead-up to Iraq War, beginning in 9/11 and then going up to the Iraq War, the invasion, you can see that the web of lies was just staggering, and recall some of the German Nazi propaganda that if you're going to tell a lie, tell a big one, And there's lots of places you can go on the web to find this, but there was a slam dunk.
There's no doubt.
They knew where the weapons of mass destruction were.
They knew that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy yellow cake from Nigeria.
They knew that Saddam Hussein had Connections with Al-Qaeda, which, as a secular ruler, he didn't.
So, in general, about 935 lies were told in the lead-up to the war.
The first war is always the war on truth.
After that becomes the war on flesh.
And this is consistent with lies told in the past.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident was fabricated that began the Vietnam War.
And you just can go back.
I've done a whole true new series on war lies.
You can check out more of those.
The lies are just astounding, staggering, and completely predictable.
So, President Bush, October 7, 2002, said, The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
Not true.
The Department of Energy officials who monitor nuclear plants say the tubes could not have been used for enriching uranium.
One intelligence analyst who was part of the tubes investigation angrily told the New Republic, you had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges.
She said that on television, and that's just a lie.
That's just a lie.
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This was in the State of Union address, January 28, 2003.
In March, Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, tells the UN Security Council That the documents substantiating the claim of alleged Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Niger were fakes, and bad ones at that, and that these specific allegations are unfounded.
The unnamed ex-ambassador, whom the CIA sent to check out the story tells in the Republic, they knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie.
I mean, the dates were wrong, the guy's signature was wrong, it was a really bad forgery, and this is elevated to the status of a war that causes 1.5 million dead.
Lie!
We've learned that Iraq has trained Al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.
Alliance with terrorists could easily allow the Iraq regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.
No evidence of this has ever been leaked or produced.
Colin Powell told the UN this alleged training took place in a camp in northern Iraq.
To his great embarrassment, the area he indicated was later revealed to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied warplanes.
Lie.
We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons and that they have dispersed them and that they've weaponized and that in one case at least the command and control arrangements have been established.
2003, President Bush, National Radio Address.
Despite a massive nationwide search by U.S. and British forces, there are no science traces or examples of chemical weapons being deployed in the field or anywhere else during the war.
What is not in dispute is that about 1,000 uranium-enriched shells were fired, which have significant health consequences, as we'll see.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003.
We know where Iraq's WMDs are.
They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
Man, wouldn't it be nice to be lied to by somebody who wasn't such a ridiculously bad liar?
No such weapons were found, not to the east, west, south, or north, somewhat or otherwise.
We could go on.
May 2003, remember?
Mission accomplished.
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.
May 29th.
We've found them!
We've found the weapons of mass destruction.
No.
May 1st, 2004.
Daily life of Iraqis is improving.
One year later, after mission accomplished, despite many challenges, life for the Iraqi people is a world away from the cruelty and corruption of Saddam's regime.
At the most basic level of justice, people are no longer disappearing into political prisons, torture chambers, and mass graves, because the former dictator is in prison himself, and their daily life is improving.
Approval of President Bush's handling of the war and overall job.
This is from 2003 to 2007.
It's a massive decline.
I mean, everybody who cheered what the government did really does have blood on their hands.
I mean, it's sad but true that this is not possible to be accomplished.
These kinds of slaughters, you can't accomplish them.
Without the cheers of people like you, perhaps people around you, and this is why we avoid the consequences of our blind patriotism.
Fewer Republicans even say war was the right decision, and this is one of the great hypocritical tragedies of the modern world, which is the degree to which the anti-war movement has dissolved under Obama, because it was anti-Bush, not anti-war.
Was the Iraq war a right thing or a mistake?
Well, as you can see here, going from 70% to 80% down to 40% or below.
I'm sure it continues to go down now.
This is from 2007.
So this is a UK opinion, an Iraq survey.
Were the US and British right or wrong to take military action?
Right, 29%.
Wrong, 60%.
Refused or don't know, 1% and 9% respectively.
So the support for the war is, of course, diminishing, even with the absence of information about what is occurring in Iraq.
It's Britain, a safer place as a result of the war in Iraq.
Safer, 5%.
No difference, 37%.
Less safe, 55%.
Don't know, 3%.
The only grave marker that points some light towards the future on the bodies of the 1.5 million Iraqi dead, would you trust the government now if it said military action was needed?
Don't know 4%, trust 32%, neither trust nor distrust 13%, but distrust 51%.
This is...
Shocking and staggering progress.
It is at an enormous cost, but it is a staggering process for people to actually begin to distrust what governments say about the necessity for military action.
So the corruption involved in the Iraq war is staggering and, of course, completely predictable.
War always involves massive amounts of corruption and theft from the general population and from the future in terms of debt and from the resources of the country being destroyed.
So between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day, Of Iraq's declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for and could have been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling, according to a draft American government report.
Using about 50 bucks a barrel, the discrepancy was valued between 5 and 15 million dollars a day.
A day.
Halliburton's overcharge is classified by the Pentagon as unreasonable and unsupported 1.4 billion dollars.
A commission determined that contracting waste in Afghanistan ranged from 10% to 20% of the $206 billion spent there so far, with fraud, which includes bribery and rigging bids, comprising between 5% and 9% of the total.
I would imagine that these are just very conservative estimates.
This is just the stuff that shows up on the radar.
This is the stuff that's been reported by people who weren't bribed to keep it quiet.
The war is an excuse for theft, right?
Like, you know, there's this old cliché that if someone, like some kid, bumps into you in a crowded street and he's an accomplice of the thief and the thief then takes your wallet as you are dealing with the kid, it's a distraction.
War is a distraction for theft and for the acting out of sociopathic murder impulses as part of the killback class, the soldiers.
Members of the Wartime Contracting Commission estimated that a lack of oversight of private contractors, a lack of competition for winning contracts, and a culture of corruption plagued reconstruction projects and battlefield support in both countries.
Those failings cost between $31 billion and $60 billion, the Associated Press reported.
That's a truly staggering amount of money.
The idea that the military can rebuild a country is ludicrous.
I mean, you might as well send a bunch of computer programmers to fight a war.
I mean, it's just a completely different skill set and a completely different mindset and simply can't be achieved.
Soldiers are not superheroes who are good at everything.
They are good at blowing things up and breaking things and killing people.
that's not really the skill set that you're looking for in building a country.
And let's look at the accountability.
This is very important.
It's frustrating, of course, for anyone with a moral sense, but let's look at this.
So March 5th, 2004.
Former UN weapons inspector declares the Iraq war illegal.
The war was declared and continued under false pretenses.
The Iraq war was a violation of the international crime of aggression, which is a war crime, and would result in the death penalty.
And it doesn't matter, of course, right?
I mean, Death penalty is only for the victims of the state, not for those who run the state.
The US opened a military offensive against the Arab Republic on the premise that the Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction.
One decade later, the global community is aware that the intelligence claims of Iraqi WMDs were patently false, at least, and a blatant fabrication at worst, but this knowledge has done nothing to erase the damage of the conflict.
Ah, Mr.
John Bolton.
Bolton backed an Iraq invasion as early as 1998, when he signed a letter from the Project for a New American Century, urging then-President Bill Clinton to attack Saddam Hussein.
Ah, wasn't it nice when the only major problems that we had with American presidents was blowjobs?
As the State Department's top arms control official during President Bush's first term, Bolton played a role in pushing the allegation that Saddam Hussein sought uranium In Africa.
Now, if you defraud your insurance company, if you lie on a job application, if you do any kinds of minor fraudulent things, you will be charged, you will be fired, you will face negative consequences.
What if you told lies that resulted in the deaths of millions of people?
Well, nothing.
In fact, you know, promotions.
Bolton remains an influential player in Republican foreign policy circles.
A senior fellow at the Conservative American Enterprise Institute, he publicly mulled the 2012 presidential run before serving as a key advisor to Mitt Romney.
This tells you all you need to know about the power of Mormonism to shield you from evil.
That this worm tongue was also whispering into Mitt Romney's waxen ear.
L. Paul Bremer.
Known as Jerry, Bremer was the top civilian administrator in Iraq.
Bremer's tenure was plagued by charges of financial mismanagement.
A 2005 Inspector General's report disputed by the Pentagon found that the U.S. lost track of $9 billion allocated for Iraq's reconstruction.
Now, Bremmer lives in Vermont and paints rural landscape scenes, perfects his French cooking, and serves on several corporate boards.
I, myself, would never be seen in the same room with this man, but I guess lots of other people like his government connections because it allows them to siphon off some of the blood money of war profits that are driven through state power.
Elliot Cohen, he was a founding member of Crystal's PNAC, was a key agitator for an Iraq invasion and for a maximalist response to the 9-11 attacks.
In a November 2001 op-ed in which he called the war on terror World War IV, Cohen argued that the U.S. should target Iraq because it had helped al-Qaeda and developed weapons of destruction.
Now, he teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
the boys from Brazil Teaching other people how to run international relations.
When you look at this through a clear-eyed moral lens, the hierarchy of our world is progressively more ghastly as we rise to the top.
We truly have zombie hearts, sociopaths, and all the people surrounding them running things.
If you don't understand the degree to which evil people run the world, the world remains kind of incomprehensible.
But of course the evil people can only run the world because we praise them and we worship them and we respect them.
And they look reasonable in suits and speak calmly.
And we don't listen to the content of what they say, only the form.
So So what was predicted and what resulted from the war in Iraq?
Well, the Bush's administration pre-war estimates of the cost of the war was 50 to 60 billion dollars, as reported in New York Times at the end of 2002, and of course this was supposed to be paid for by the oil revenues coming from Iraq.
$12 billion direct cost per month of the Iraq war as of 2008.
So the entire cost was supposed to be a few months' worth of what the actual cost is.
$526 billion, the amount of money already appropriated by Congress for the war in Iraq.
That's as of 2008.
This was, of course, many years ago.
The total cost of the war, estimated in 2008, at $3 trillion.
Five to seven trillion dollars is the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, accounting for continued military operations, growing debt and interest payments, and continuing health care and counseling costs for veterans as of 2008.
Of course, the total sum has grown since then, so off by a factor of many thousands, and that is predictable.
I mean, they've done studies before, the government estimates are always ridiculously low, and this is what they use to sell you, and then they enslave you with this ridiculousness.
So to estimate this, you see this in sort of bubbles, the initial estimate is in the grey, 1.6 trillion spent to date and 6 trillion total cost with interest through 2053.
This is what happens when you cheer, when you gain the relief from anxiety and you submit and succumb to the Nazgul-style hatred of an imagined and invented enemy.
When you join the bloodlust, when you pursue the ogre, that is your own future self and your children's lives, and you throw pitchforks and set fire to things as part of the rabble, as part of the mob, this is what happens.
Your future gets eaten alive.
A lot of what is going on in the US economy is a direct result of the government's participation in the successful agenda of Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda, as you know, probably the Mujahideen in Soviet Russia, was trained by the CIA to bring down Soviet Russia by engaging them in unwinnable wars in Afghanistan.
And the stated goal of Bin Laden was to cripple the American Empire by getting it involved in unwinnable wars and bleeding its treasury dry.
This is how you end empires.
Why did the British Empire end?
Because England destroyed its economy and its gold reserves in the Second World War.
This is how empires end.
They run out of money.
And the best way to end an empire is to get involved in unwinnable wars and let all of the financial vultures pounce in and drain the treasury dry and waste lives through that way.
And this is how the war on terror is being consistently lost.
The treasury is being bled dry through destructive and vicious overseas wars.
And as progressive blowback incidents occur, more and more civil rights are squashed in the home front.
And all of the traumatized vets come home and become police officers and security guards and other kinds of enforcers and are then readily available to round up and herd up and control the domestic population.
The end of empire will bring the effects of empire home.
This is what happens when you don't burrow through the obsidian biosphere of the cultural protection that you are given where you don't see the bodies of the victims of your foreign policy.
So let's look at some of the effects of the war.
Of course, loss of life, fraud, capital destruction, long-term permanent environmental losses.
Let's look at the capital destruction that has occurred through the war.
It's not just the people, of course, it's the entire infrastructure that is done.
So first, of course, we have the destruction of capital as a whole.
Cost of Iraq war is rising per second, almost $4,000 per minute, over a quarter of a million per hour, close to $14 million per day, $330 million per week, $2.3 billion, and on and on and on.
So this is the cost that is accruing to you.
I mean, it's not like Donald Rumsfeld is going to have to pay it off out of his piggy bank.
In a speech March 20, 2008, Obama, in the midst of his presidential campaign, stated, when Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you're paying a price for this war.
So the $3 trillion war, a new book by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, and what they said is the monthly operating cost of Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
war.
So it's about $16 billion.
To think of it another way, the book says roughly every American household is spending $138 per month on the current operating costs of the war, with a little more than $100 per month going to Iraq alone.
Now, it's really, really important to understand that this is really the tip of the iceberg of what it costs.
Of course, this money is not presented to the American public in the moment.
You don't start a war and then send you a bill for a few thousand dollars.
They start a war and borrow so that you get to indulge in all the vicious sentiments and brutality of patriotic bloodlust and merging with the vicious herd.
You get all those psychological short-term benefits, but you're not presented with any kind of bill that would lower your desire and your bloodthirstiness.
So the money's borrowed and the money is then spent and blown away and just destroyed and fed into the sausage mill of human disassembly, which is warfare.
And that money is not available for entrepreneurs, it's not available for investors, and the people who are over in the war aren't doing other things that would be productive to the economy.
So these are the direct costs.
The indirect costs are many times higher.
And so this is the reality.
You can't have war without debt.
They say that war is the health of the state, but the reality is that the state is the health of war.
You can't have war without the state, and I've written articles on this, which you can find on my website.
So the Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee estimated $3.5 trillion cost through 2017, said the war would cost the average U.S. family $46,400.
$46,400 per person.
The total cost would be $11,627.
Do you have that on you?
But, of course, not everyone is economically productive.
Total gainfully employed in 2008, this is, of course, before the massive unemployment started, 130 million people.
In 2008, 16 billion cost per gainfully employed person, which is the division, 116 dollars per month per gainfully employed person.
Now, lots of people employed in the public sector who are net negatives on the Treasury, because they're paid through money taxed or borrowed or printed.
So, if we look at that, per gainfully employed person, it's $138 per month.
So, what has been spent on Iraq cumulatively through the Department of Defense, State and Veterans Administration, This is a tsunami, really, of blood measured in dollars.
So, the $440 billion spent on the war is up until 2006.
You could provide complete health care coverage for all 45 million uninsured Americans for a year, five years of public housing for all 3 million homeless Americans, three years of food for all 36 million hungry Americans, one nice dinner for everyone in Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea, And, I mean, I don't believe any of these should be done because they would all involve the forcible redistribution of income through state power, but it's a good way to measure what could be done.
So the Iraq War, this is a variety of studies, so these numbers are not all the same.
Of course, it's impossible to get any kind of final numbers in these things.
The Iraq War cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion.
Cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades, counting interest, claims a study.
HuffPost found 2007 Iraq War was costing $11 million per hour, or $6,000 every second.
Total amount of money lost or unaccounted for from the Iraq War, $9 billion.
Total amount of money lost and unaccounted for stolen equipment, $549.7 million.
So, this is an example.
I mean, this is what happens in the military.
After the U.S. and Allied warplanes destroyed a key bridge carrying 15 oil and gas pipelines in northern Iraq during the 2003 conflict, so they made its post-war reconstruction a top priority, but instead of spending two months to rebuild the span over the Tigris River at an estimated cost of $5 million, they decided for security reasons to bury the pipelines beneath it, which would cost more than five times more.
So, what happened tells the story of this So, studies conducted before the digging of the new pipeline started showed that the soil was too sandy, but neither the Army Corps of Engineers overseeing the effort nor the main contractor at the site, Kellogg Brown and Root, heeded the warning.
As a result, tens of millions of dollars were wasted on churning sand without making any headway.
A special inspector general for Iraq, Reconstruction, Stuart Brown, said.
And, of course, the purpose is not to rebuild the bridge.
The purpose is not to put the 15 oil and gas pipelines back together.
The purpose is to make a lot of activity and steal a lot of money.
I'm sorry, this is just the way war is.
By the time the digging effort was halted and the old bridge and piping repaired, more than three years later, the bill had reached more than $100 million.
Massive profits for people involved.
Massive losses for everyone else.
Because of the nature of the original contract, the government was unable to recover any of the money wasted on this project.
And also because there's no particular incentive for them to do so.
More than 1.5 billion in oil revenues may have been lost as a result of the delays.
I mean, there's no point getting frustrated.
I mean, there's no point getting frustrated.
I mean, it's like driving a tractor into your garage and then getting upset that it falls down.
I mean, this is what war is.
This is what war does.
So here's more from Afghanistan.
A commission cited numerous examples of waste, including a 360 million U.S. financed agricultural development program in Afghanistan.
The effort began as a $60 million project in 2009 to distribute vouchers for wheat seed and fertilizer in drought-stricken areas of northern Afghanistan.
The program, as it always does, expanded into the south and east.
Soon the U.S. was spending $1 million a day on the program, creating an environment ripe for waste and abuse, the commission said.
Paying villagers for what they used to do voluntarily destroyed local initiatives and diverted project goods into Pakistan for resale, the commission said.
I mean, not to mention, of course, that the Taliban, evil though they were, had done somewhat of a decent job of reducing or destroying the opium crop, the poppy crop, which now, of course, is back and has diverted a huge amount of criminal resources away from possibly productive activities to the shipping is back and has diverted a huge amount of criminal resources away from possibly productive activities to the shipping of opium and heroin
You know, if you fail to provide receipts, if you get audited, this is a big problem.
But that's only because you see you're a tax livestock.
The people in charge are not subject to really any of the rules that you were subjected to.
So when Bowen's office asked to see a logbook documenting 1.3 billion in fuel purchases by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the logbook could not be found.
Put it down here somewhere.
Defense officials also could not produce documents supporting their expenditure of over $100 million in cash found in a vault at the Republican Palace.
The gilded Saddam Hussein parlor that became a headquarters of the occupation.
Average U.S. expenditures for Iraqi reconstruction in 05, for example, were more than $25 million a day when Bowen's auditors went looking for documents supporting billions of dollars of fund transfers to the Iraqi government.
In that period, they discovered the paperwork was largely missing.
Who pays?
Nobody.
You, your children, the future Iraqis.
Post-war planning was non-existent.
This is very, very important, very important to understand.
This is a money grab, it's a power grab, and it's a way of venting the murder-lust of sociopaths.
It's not to do with reconstructing the country.
In March 2003, which is when the Iraq war began, there was a meeting of war planners and intelligence planners in which a lieutenant colonel, who was giving a briefing on the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, could say only, to be provided, which means to not be provided.
A veteran State Department of Officer involved directly in Iraq policy said, we didn't go in with a plan, we went in with a theory.
We'll be greeted as liberators, we'll spend a bunch of money, and everything will turn into Shangri-La.
So the Associated Press reported earlier recently that the U.S. military authorities in Kabul believe $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has spent nearly a decade battling, the Taliban, criminals, and power brokers with ties.
Do both.
When this money all goes missing, when this money walks off, it floats around, and a lot of it, like the weapons, ends up in the hands of your enemy.
380 tons of explosives are missing.
380 tons of powerful conventional explosives have been missing since April 2003, after the U.S. invaded Iraq.
A New York Times article of 25 October 2004 says that the facility was supposed to be under U.S. military control, but is now a no-man's land.
The U.S. was warned about the stockpile of explosives before the war, but of course there was this big photo op drive to get to Baghdad, right?
So they just had to leave the explosive behind, which were then stolen by all the people to be able to make 20 years' worth of IEDs.
So, a firm based in Dubai managed to keep around $4 billion in Pentagon construction contracts, despite routinely marking up the price of switches and plumbing parts between 3,000 and 12,000 percent, according to an audit that Bowen conducted in 2011.
June 13, 2011, Department of Defense announces that $6.6 billion, earmarked for Iraq, has been lost with no explanation.
America airlifted massive quantities of money into Iraq in the chaos following the 03 invasion, filling cargo planes with shrink-wrapped bundles of hundred-dollar bills worth billions of dollars.
The money was stashed at one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces and at U.S. military bases before being distributed to Iraqis, which sometimes involved transporting sacks of money in pickup trucks.
Previous investigations had already uncovered massive waste and corruption in Iraqi reconstruction, but this was the first time an investigator suggested That money had been directly stolen, not lost through mismanagement.
Come on, you put a bunch of young guys in charge of crates worth of $100 bills.
I mean, what do you expect is going to happen?
I mean, good heavens.
So let's see what this government program to battle terrorism has achieved.
The theory, of course, is that violence will always achieve the opposite of its intended goal.
And let's see.
So, the number of global terrorist incidents from January to September 11, 2001, 1,188.
From January to September 11, 2006, five years later, after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the TSA and Department of Homeland Security and CIA, involvement around the world and massive spending to combat the war on terror, the number of global terrorist incidents were 5,188.
So, of course, almost five times as much.
From 2006 to 2007, the violence in Afghanistan increased 30%.
Number of suicide bombings in Afghanistan in 2001, 21.
Number of suicide bombings in 2006, 139, with an additional increase of 69% as of November 2007.
How you like me now?
Okay, so let's look at the environmental losses.
This is something that is not really much understood, I think, in the media as a whole and among the population as a whole.
This is what your labor is creating.
So how much oil did the U.S. military use in 2008 in Iraq?
At least as much as 1.2 million cars on the road that year.
It's an enormous amount of oil.
We'll get to that in a second.
So the targeting of industrial sites and armament factories causes acute pollution.
And when you drop a bunker buster bomb into a site which uses chemicals, the chemicals will all get released into the air, the groundwater, the soil.
Nine sites expected to be targets were named by the UK government as being involved in the production of chemical and biological weapons.
And this is just terrible for the environment.
So check this out.
The amount of fuel that has been burned by military vehicles to keep the operation moving is massive.
The US military has said that its planes, boats and tanks are consuming 15 million gallons of fuel a day.
Let's put this in context.
The amount of fuel that the coalition is using in one day is the approximate amount that 1.1 billion people in India need to keep their whole economy going for the same amount of time.
I want to read this again, really let this sink in.
The amount of fuel the coalition is using in one day is the approximate amount that 1.1 billion people in India need to keep their whole economy going for the same amount of time.
How many environmentalists are talking about this, are protesting this?
Well, no, because their lefty dude is in the office, so politics over people always, sadly.
So, Bush says that things are improving for Iraqis.
Let's look at their environment.
River damage, irrigation and drinking, water quality damage.
Many of those industries that were devoted to producing military material have been bombed and looted, leaving the country dotted with highly toxic industrial zones.
There's other contaminated sites that belong to the oil and metal industries.
The Interpress Service news agency reported that there are a variety of environmental problems that continue to plague the country as a result of the fighting.
Industrial waste, hospital waste, fertilizer runoff from farming, as well as oil spills plague the two rivers that define the Mesopotamia region, which provide much of the irrigation and drinking water.
So, the destruction of the infrastructure has huge effects on public health.
Bombed out industrial plants and factories have polluted groundwater that damaged sewage treatment plants, with reports The raw sewage is forming massive pools of muck in the streets of Baghdad immediately after Bush's shock and awe campaign.
It's also likely poisoning rivers as well as human life.
Cases of typhoid among Iraqi citizens have risen tenfold since 1991, largely due to polluted drinking water.
Can't escape the war.
Long after the bombs go off, the war is still killing people.
On the second day of President Bush's invasion of Iraq, it was reported by the New York Times and the BBC that Iraqi forces had set fire to several of the country's large oil wells.
This, of course, occurred in the first Gulf War as well.
Five days later, in the Romelia oilfield, six dozen wellheads were set ablaze at a rate of $12 million of oil per hour.
The dense black smoke rose high into the southern sky of Iraq, fanning a clear signal that the U.S. invasion had again ignited environmental tragedy.
Spilled oil in the Arabian Gulf.
The first Gulf War had horrific effects on the environment, as CNN reported in 1999.
Iraq was responsible for intentionally releasing some 11 million barrels of oil into the Arabian Gulf from January to May 1991, oiling more than 800 miles of Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian coastlines.
The amount of oil released was categorized as 20 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and twice as large as the previous world record oil spill.
The cost of the cleanup has been estimated at more than $700 million.
The state gets a free pass.
I mean, if a private industry had done this, it would be all over the news, all over every environmental site you can imagine.
But it's not well known, this, because it's the government, so it's held to a different standard, or rather to no standard.
During the build-up to George Bush's invasion of Raksdam, loyalists promised to light oil fields afire, hoping to expose what they claimed were the U.S.'s underlying motives for attacking their country, oil.
The U.N. calculated that out of Kuwait's 1,330 active oil wells, half had been set ablaze.
The pungent fumes and smoke from these dark billowing flames spread for hundreds of miles and had horrible effects on human and environmental health.
The resulting smoke was enough to block out the sun.
Fallout from the Kuwait oil wells resulted in the average air temperature falling by 10 degrees Celsius or 18 degrees Fahrenheit while the oil well burned for over nine months.
Oil, soot, sulfur, and acid rain came down as far as 1,900 kilometers or 1,200 miles away and the vegetation and animals were poisoned while the water was contaminated and the people choked.
The burning oil fields released almost half a billion tons of carbon dioxide and Worldwide, motor vehicles currently emit well over 900 million metric tons of CO2 each year.
These emissions account for more than 15% of global fossil fuel CO2 releases.
The CO2 produced from the burning oil fields is the equivalent to the sum of the CO2 output for all of the cars in the world for over 200 days.
So let's look at some of the indirect ecological consequences of the war.
So this burning oil was laced with poisonous chemicals like mercury, sulfur, and furans, which can cause serious damage to human as well as ecosystem health.
According to Friends of the Earth, the fallout from burning oil debris Like that of the first Gulf War has created a toxic sea surface that has affected the health of birds and marine life.
In the early 1990s, the US drowned at least 80 crude oil ships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf, partly to uphold the UN's economic sanctions against Iraq.
Vast crude oil slicks formed, killing an unknown quantity of aquatic life and seabirds while wreaking havoc on local fishing and tourist communities.
The wars have also damaged forests, wetlands and marshlands in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
Total forest area decreased 38% in Afghanistan from 1990 to 2007.
It's also most likely the case in Iraq.
So, this is some of the worst stuff.
Months of bombings by US and British planes and cruise missiles also left behind an even more deadly and insidious legacy.
Tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb fragments laced with depleted uranium.
In all, the US hit Iraqi targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.
What are the long-term consequences of these bombings?
So when the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes into microscopic fragments that float through the air like carcinogenic dust carried on the desert winds for decades.
The lethal bits, when inhaled, stick to the fibers of the lungs and eventually begin to wreak havoc on the body in the form of tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged immune systems, and leukemia.
So 15 years later, after the first war, Iraqi physicians call it the White Death.
Since 1990, the incidence rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600%.
The situation was compounded by Iraq's forced isolation and the sadistic sanctions regime, once described by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as a humanitarian crisis that made detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.
The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by American bombs in 1996, tripled in the five years following the bombings.
Depleted uranium Has a half-life of more than 4 billion years, approximately the age of the Earth.
This is why people were cheering.
cancer damage particularly to the young for the next 4 billion years.
A World Health Organization study published last year connected the grave situation with the effect of toxic substances prevalent in many conventional weapons.
Hair samples taken from the civilian population of Fallujah showed levels of lead in children with birth defects five times higher than elsewhere.
Mercury levels were recorded at six times higher.
And what this does, of course, to children's developing brains and neurological systems is catastrophic.
It's been associated with increased criminality in the US.
Let's look up the loss of life.
So let's start with the domestic situation.
30% of US soldiers who served in the Iraq war developed serious mental health problems within four months of returning home.
4,448 U.S. soldiers who died and 32,221 wounded.
At least 3,400 U.S. contractors died as well, a number barely mentioned or at least underreported.
The mental health issues as well, my particular take on it is that you can deal with things that you've done wrong if restitution is possible.
You know, like if I bump your car and pay you to get your car fixed and put in a little extra for your trouble, then I've created restitution and I can be free of guilt or negative feelings.
Where restitution is impossible, I'm not sure that health can ever be fully achieved again.
And what the soldiers have done in Iraq, there is no restitution for it.
A 2011 survey conservatively estimated that between 800,000 and a million Iraqi children have lost one or both parents.
War is the decimation of families.
Of course we know that.
And again, to put this in perspective, this would be 8 million to 10 million American children losing one or both parents to an invasion.
What would that do?
If you want to understand blowback, understand the feelings of rage that occurred after 9-11, multiply it by many thousands of times, stretch it over 10 years, and the amount of blowback is surprisingly low to America.
So what percentage of participants, willing or otherwise in the war, are suffering from trauma-related psychological symptoms?
US soldiers returning home, 30% Iraqi children.
70% of them are suffering from trauma-related psychological symptoms.
And they do not have the kind of resources that the veterans have when they come home.
Not even close.
So 20% of injured soldiers suffered a spinal or brain injury.
One of the salvations and tragedies of modern warfare is the degree to which combat injuries are survivable now due to increased medical response time and improved medical procedures.
So people who would have died in the past are now kept alive, though sometimes barely.
After Iraq and Afghanistan.
So researchers recently examined the post-deployment health assessments of almost a quarter of a million American soldiers returning from Iraq and over 16,000 returning from Afghanistan.
Soldiers who had served in Iraq were significantly more likely to suffer from a number of mental health concerns than those returning from Afghanistan.
And you can read the numbers here.
It's pretty brutal.
War is toxic, of course, to people's mental health.
You can't ever leave the war overseas.
Multiple deployments increase combat stress from 12% to the first deployment to 18% to the second deployment to 27% to the third or fourth deployment.
Longer tours naturally increase soldiers' mental health problems.
If you're deployed fewer than six months, you are 15% likely to have a mental health problem.
And if you're deployed for more than six months, it's 22%.
And let's not forget the massive amounts of brain-destructive drugs that are handed out to the soldiers to keep them going during the...
During these combat situations, this is an old practice.
I mean, drugging soldiers goes back to the assassins of ancient empires.
This is where hashish came from.
They were given hashish to mask the psychological agony of being repeat murderers.
And, of course, you're getting a lot of SSRIs and other kinds of psychopharmacological drugs being handed out like candy to these soldiers just to keep them going and doing what they're doing, which has so many ripple effects that are negative down the road that it's hard to measure.
Let's look at some of the views of the Iraq population.
You know, they are the ones who, of course, were supposed to be saved.
How safe do you feel in your neighborhood?
Very safe, 26% not.
Very safe, 41% not safe at all, 33%.
Do you oppose the presence of U.S. forces rising from 2004, 51%, to 2005, 65% to 78% now?
Violence against U.S. forces is acceptable.
Only 12% believed it in the past, and 51% of people believed it later on.
How are things overall in your life compared to before the war in spring 2000?
And three, well, it's going down from 20% better.
Now it's down to about 5%.
As of 2007, it's much lower now, I would imagine.
Again, I'm not going to read all of these off.
Which of these are the greatest concerns to you?
Car bombs, suicide attacks, 38%.
Violence by U.S. forces, 16%.
Fights, Iraqi government and anti-government forces, 12%.
Fights from religious groups, 8%.
Kidnappings for ransom, 7%.
Snipers, 5%.
Violence by local militia, 4%.
Violence by Iraqi police, 2%.
Violence by Iraq army, 2%.
They're much more afraid of the Americans and of the wars they provoke, or the fights they provoke, rather than their own people.
So what happens when defense becomes invasion, when defense becomes offense?
Well, the decimated and infuriated population is all set for blowback.
Approximately 2.8 million Iraqis out of a population of 34 million are displaced internally or into neighboring states.
Approximately 1.4 million are refugees.
To other countries, 1.3 million are internally displaced.
90% of displaced Iraqis have no plans to return.
How could you?
The percent of Iraqis living in slum conditions tripled from 17% prior to the 2003 invasion to 53% in 2010.
Crucial health indicators in Iraq have drastically worsened.
The infant mortality rate increased 150% from 1990 to 2005, the worst retrogression in that basic indicator of well-being in the entire world.
As of 2006, an estimated 160 to 380 Iraqi professors have been killed, and over 30% of Iraqi professors, doctors, pharmacists, and engineers emigrated between 2003 and 2007.
In the Iraq War, soldiers die and civilians get murdered.
These are the Iraq war deaths from 2004 to 2009.
Coalition forces down at the very bottom here, Iraqi forces a little higher, insurgents a little higher, but as you can see, the vast majority are civilians.
They did not choose the war, they did not choose their government, and they pay the price.
Let's look at the distribution of death from 2003 to 2013.
Civilians, 134,000.
Opposition forces, 36,000.
Other little pie slices and so on, but it is the civilians who get murdered the most in these wars.
The idea that you're going to target non-civilians is ridiculous.
Can't happen.
Let's look at this through pixels.
I'll just let you drink this in.
There's not really any way to describe it in terms of audio.
Civilians should be in red, really.
This is from October 2010.
This is taken from WikiLeaks documents.
Iraqi deaths may total 600,000 just from 2003 to 2006.
A study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health determined that the rate of violent deaths in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, extrapolating from a survey of almost 2,000 households, the report estimates that 601,000 N27 Iraqi civilians died in violence between March 2003 and this July, a figure far higher than other previous estimates.
And who is responsible for these deaths?
12.1% coalition, tiny percentage Iraqi, 14.6% insurgents, 71.8% unknown.
In Iraq, over 100,000 prisoners have passed through the American-run detention system, with prisoners not having any effective way to challenge their detention.
In the first years of the war, many detainees were processed through the notorious Abu Qarayb prison, housed over 8,000 prisoners at its peak in 2004, The International Red Cross estimated, in 2004, that between 70 and 90% of detainees in Iraq were innocent.
In 2004, accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including the torture, rape, sodomy, and the death of Abergrave prisoners, came to public attention.
At least 108 such people have died in detention in the first four years of the war, and at least 80 more have died in subsequent years.
This total war is not just Iraq.
Here's an example.
It's pulled fairly randomly.
February 12, 2010, U.S. forces entered a village in the Bhaktia province in Afghanistan, and after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians, government officials, who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives, a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager.
These U.S. Special Forces soldiers proceeded to dig the bullets out of their victims' bodies, then lied to their superiors about what had happened.
When the Pentagon issued a statement on the raid, it claimed that the dead males were terrorists.
The bodies of three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the house and suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived.
After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American special ops assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had in fact killed the women during the nighttime raid.
And the people who did this when shooting a pregnant woman, can you recover from that psychologically?
What effect is that going to have on the vestiges of your humanity?
Again, these are direct and indirect deaths, but the direct body count puts the number of dead civilians between 110, 937, 121, 227.
But the opinion research business, an independent polling agency based in London, has calculated the number of fatalities at over 1 million.
The dates of these are different, so this is why we have disparities.
Baghdad.
which contains roughly one-fifth of the country's population, has suffered roughly half of the recorded civilian deaths or about 2.5 times more than the national average.
Almost 15,000 or 13% of all documented civilian deaths were reported as being directly caused by the US-led coalition.
The report notes that of the 4,000 civilian victims of US-led coalition forces for whom age data was available, Over 1,200 or almost a third were children.
Of the 45,779 victims for whom the IBC was able to obtain age data, almost 4,000 were children under the age of 18.
So Phil Donohue and Bill Moyers could be considered the only two major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints that challenged the rush to war in Iraq.
General Electric and Microsoft were MSNBC's founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war.
An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press stated that Phil Donahue was hurting the image of the network.
He would be a, quote, difficult public face for NBC in a time of war, the memo read.
Donahue was fired and never returned to the airwaves.
Donoghue said, of the pressure the network put on him near the end, it evolved into an absurdity.
He continued, we were told we had to have two conservatives for every liberal on the show.
I was considered a liberal.
I could have Richard Perle on Alone But Not Dennis Kucinich.
He felt the tremendous fear corporate media had for being on an unpopular side during the ramp-up for a war.
And let's not forget that General Electric's biggest customer at the time was Donald Rumsfeld.
Almost everything you see...
With regards to state policy, is a commercial for evil, to blind you to evil.
It's a Trojan horse of blood inside a My Little Pony.
Nobody sees the pain, he said.
The war is sanitized.
And this is very true.
There's no law that says that an American newspaper or website even or radio or television show, there's nothing to say that they can't broadcast or describe images of the dead.
Can you imagine if USA Today had on its front page pictures of the Iraqi dead in one particular day where they could even be obtained?
Can you imagine what would happen?
This is the censorship that occurs without the state simply as a result of Brainwashing as a result of programming, as a result of living inside the evil heart of a murderous empire.
This is what people cannot talk about.
And this is partly why, is that the media profits from wars.
The media relies on information, frankly, misinformation handed to them by the government, which means that if the media questions that, their sources dry up.
They can't get the material without expensive and potentially lawsuit-inducing investigations.
And so what you're fed is propaganda.
It's ridiculous, and it's brutal, and it's evil, and it's inevitable when the government gets this much power, which is fundamentally, all of this is predicated on the power to control currency.
The power to print money is what makes all of this evil possible.
The anti-war movement would be even stronger if people were to have their taxes increased in a ratio proportionate to the amount of violence and debt that was being run into.
But because the government can print money, people are not directly hit in the wallet by these acts of evil, and the effects show up in a variety of other means, like housing crashes, unemployment, that fewer than 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 people can connect back to the war itself.
So, here's some examples.
I mean, have you seen these pictures?
Do you know what is happening in your name, with your money, overseas?
And do you understand, do you fundamentally understand, that the people overseas see the American Country Music Awards, they see the Oscars, they see the television shows, they see the reality shows in America, they see people dancing in the streets, they see parades, they see everything occurring in the empire With the consciousness, really, and the moral sensitivity of a marathon runner who doesn't even notice that he's stepped on an ant.
The view from outside the empire is essential to understand if you want to understand how the world is, why the world is, and what happens in terms of backlash.
There's no law that prevents you from seeing these images.
There's no rule that prevents these from being published.
But to disturb the tender, orchid-based, hothouse flower sensitivities of people inside the empire, to disturb them with any kind of truth, is really unthinkable for almost all media outlets.
You must be protected from these images.
You must be shielded from the truth of what has been done with your money and in your name.
But until we see this, until we recognize this, until we accept this It will continue.
You can't ever fight evil.
Once it's identified as evil, it loses its power.
You can only fight the evil that pretends to be good.
You can only fight the violence that pretends to be virtue.
And the only thing you can do is to reveal it for what it is.
The brutal and sociopathic disassembly of human beings, largely innocent, who had no control over the invasion, over their own government, over the resources that are there, no control over what is happening, and that we as citizens have more in common with the Iraqis than our own masters, because we're both subject to state power.
I don't really have a conclusion, but I really do appreciate you sticking with the content of the presentation.
It's very, very important to understand.
Please send this to people who are losing track of the war or who are distracted by their own woes.
Looking at the woes that the American economy is facing can't really be solved, can't really be understood without looking at the horrors that are being inflicted overseas and the degree to which the media is keeping this information from you.
Please send this around.
This is why people are unemployed.
This is why the economy is collapsing.
This is why there are terror attacks.
This is why all of this is occurring.
And if you don't understand this and what's happening and the view from outside the empire, the empire will never end.
This is Stefan Molyneux.
Please drop by freedominradio.com.
I will put sources to this in the low bar below the video and in the notes of the podcast.
fdrurl.com forward slash hell if you would like to get more of the sources for this.
Thank you so much for your patience in this presentation and open your eyes in order to stay safe.
▲
Export Selection