Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses media silence, increased terrorism, the enthusiasm of violence and true cost of the Iraq War on RT's Breaking The Set with Abby Martin.
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| Just this month, 71 people have already lost their lives in Iraq, a death toll that's seemingly not slowing down from April, which was the deadliest month the country had seen in the last five years. | |
| Here in America, people see headlines of this ongoing violence on the lower third of their TV screens or back page in the newspaper, all in a very detached and abstract way. | |
| In order to fully understand the magnitude of the chaos and empathize with the Iraqi people, we must see this reality through their lens, from outside the empire looking in. | |
| My next guest has just released an hour-long presentation called Iraq, A Decade of Hell, which aims to do just that. | |
| His name is Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio, and he joins me now from Ontario, Canada. | |
| Thanks so much for coming on, Stefan. | |
| Thank you. | |
| It's a pleasure. | |
| So as I mentioned, April was the deadliest month in the last five years in Iraq. | |
| 700 people died. | |
| And now that there's no U.S. troops there, the country's sovereign once more. | |
| What does it look like in terms of infrastructure, safety and health at this current time? | |
| Well, it genuinely is catastrophic, Abby. | |
| This is one thing that those within the empire are kind of shielded from the reality of what's going on outside, and then it just shows up in what seems like random attacks like the recent bombings in Boston. | |
| And it's wretched. | |
| I mean, the first thing to remember is that you've got to multiply Iraq's statistics by about 10 to gain an equivalency in U.S. numbers, right? | |
| So since the coalition invaded in 2003, we've had about, the estimates are about 1.5 million deaths as a result of that invasion. | |
| That's about 15 million equivalent deaths. | |
| Or two-thirds the population of Texas. | |
| So those kinds of numbers stagger the imagination. | |
| The tolls on families has been unbelievable. | |
| Almost three million Iraqis displaced. | |
| Again, that's like the entire population of Texas ending up in Mexico because they had to flee conditions that were so horrific. | |
| Between 800 and a million Iraqi children have lost one or both of their parents as a result of the coalition invasion. | |
| Again, between eight and ten million American children losing one Are both parents. | |
| The infrastructure destruction is staggering. | |
| The hospitals, sewage plants, the amount of environmental destruction, 40% of Afghanistan's forests have been completely vaporized. | |
| And, of course, during the invasion, as was with the first Gulf War, there were massive fires set to oil wells and so on. | |
| The white death, as the Iraqi physicians call it, the result of nearly a thousand radioactive weapons being used against tanks and other infrastructure in Iraq, has resulted in a six-fold increase in leukemia because, of course, it has a half-life of about the life of the planet of four billion years. | |
| This stuff atomizes into the air, goes into the lungs. | |
| Typhus is up tenfold because drinking water and cleaning facilities have been destroyed. | |
| The countries are smoking wreckage, and this is not something that we see. | |
| And until we see it, I think it's going to be really hard to rein in foreign policy if you can't see the bloody footprint on the face of the world. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And I think another really underreported part, as much as I've researched Iraq, I didn't hear this quote from a senior strategist, an army veteran, who said, we didn't have a plan. | |
| We had a theory to invade. | |
| And the post-war building up and rebuilding Iraq was virtually non-existent, Stefan, which you point out very clearly. | |
| It's just amazing to go in and invade a country and to destroy it completely and not have any sort of plan of how to restructure this. | |
| I mean, of course, it's not about that. | |
| It's about the money. | |
| Let's back up a bit. | |
| I want to pull up an interesting point that you made in your presentation where you said that from January to September 2001, the number of global terrorist incidents was 1,188. | |
| The same period in 2006 shot up 5,188. | |
| What does this signify and what does it really mean? | |
| Well, it signifies that, shockingly, a government program called Let's Bring Peace to the World is achieving the exact opposite of its intended goal, unlike all the other government programs you've ever heard of. | |
| The reality, of course, is that if you want to understand why America is subject to repeated attacks, all you have to do is cast your mind back to September 11, 2001, and remember the rage and anger, frustration, and desire to lash out and attack and bomb people Well, human beings all over the world are human beings all over the world. | |
| If you drop drones down people's chimneys, if you destroy their infrastructure, if you cause them to not be able to get any medical supplies, as was the UK-US-led coalition sanctions throughout the 1990s in Iraq, people are going to be angry. | |
| People are going to be upset. | |
| If you blow people up, if you destroy their lives, destroy their families, destroy their cities, destroy their infrastructure, they're going to be angry. | |
| So this is just a natural thing. | |
| If you go around poking hornet sets around the world, you're going to get stung in a very terrible way. | |
| And until we understand that, we really are not going to have any success in quelling these violence. | |
| And, of course, the army is not engineers. | |
| They're not capitalists. | |
| They don't build malls. | |
| They break things and blow up people. | |
| How on earth could they possibly rebuild something? | |
| It's like asking a wrecking ball to be an architect. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, war begets terror. | |
| I mean, war is terror. | |
| So it's just an absurd concept to be fighting a war on a tactic that we are the biggest perpetrators of in the world, the global hegemon. | |
| Let's talk about money, because we hear estimates still, Stefan, that the Iraq war cost $800 billion, maybe a trillion dollars. | |
| I mean, you rarely hear that. | |
| I mean, what is the true cost of the war, really? | |
| Well, let's compare it to what was claimed at the beginning, 50 to 60 billion dollars. | |
| Don't you remember, it was all going to be paid for by all the oil they were going to get out and all that kind of stuff, which of course made no economic sense at all. | |
| I mean, as Churchill pointed out, during the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War, if you go and strip all the Germans of their goods and ship it to England, all you do is put English manufacturers out of business. | |
| So all the free oil would have just been destruction to the legitimate oil interests throughout the world. | |
| But the cost of the war is truly staggering. | |
| Close to $50,000 per household. | |
| And that's, of course, not counting all the interest that's going to accumulate. | |
| So $1.6 trillion has been spent to date. | |
| The total cost through 2053 is considered to be over $6 trillion. | |
| I think that's a little more than half the GDP of America. | |
| And this doesn't count all the opportunity costs of what the people who are in the war and whose brains and bodies have been mangled might have done with their productive energies had they not been so traumatized. | |
| So the costs of the war are incalculable. | |
| And what bothers me so much, Abby, is that all the people who are waving flags and cheering as everybody went off to war and who were cheering the Nintendo fireworks of this war have now turned away from the consequences of their patriotism. | |
| And I find that absolutely morally reprehensible. | |
| Everybody who supported the war needs to go online and have a look at the pictures of what is going on over there. | |
| This is the result of your allegiance to power. | |
| This is the result of your desire for vengeance. | |
| This is the result of listening to the lies of your leaders. | |
| We really need to wake up as citizens and not be so blindly swallowing and accepting of the stuff that the media portrays, or in this case doesn't portray, by keeping us shielded from the results of our own enthusiasm for violence. | |
| Stefan, I share your anger, and especially in the build-up as we're seeing the propaganda being repeated about Syria, Iran. | |
| We definitely need to be completely aware, acute, of what we're being told, question everything, and demand accountability. | |
| And let's talk really quickly about why we're being shielded from this. | |
| I mean, not even to mention the deaths. | |
| People need to just watch your presentation, Iraq, a decade of hell, because it really breaks down so many underreported points. | |
| But why do we still hear I mean, we don't hear the million death toll. | |
| This poll that was taken in 2008 from opinion research business, the most comprehensive poll ever done on the ground. | |
| Why don't we hear this number still, which of course is probably astronomically higher now and will be for generations with the DU poisoning. | |
| Why are we being shielded from this information and how can we extend empathy for people to really care about this? | |
| Do I have 30 seconds to answer that extremely challenging question? | |
| Okay, well, look, look, there's a few reasons. | |
| The first, of course, is that we have a Democrat in the White House, which means the anti-war movement has been castrated by its own moral hypocrisy. | |
| It turned out to just be an anti-Bush movement rather than an anti-war movement. | |
| All of those avenues of people protesting against the war mysteriously vanish when you have a Democrat in the House. | |
| So people need to look in the mirror and recognize it's not about which party is in the House. | |
| It's about what's happening overseas and get off your butts and get back out there and start protesting all of this immorality. | |
| The second is that we do have this kind of knee-jerk reaction, happy to say, well, we have a problem, let's go to the government to solve it. | |
| And when we look at the most horrendous and hellacious aspects of government policy, the fact that our government leaders are condoning, sanctioning, encouraging, and continuing this unbelievable catastrophe overseas, I think what it does is it gives people pause about whether government really is the best agency by which we can solve all our complex social problems. | |
| And I think looking at the evils that the government is capable of, It brings people, like, flat up against that it may not be the best place we want to go to to solve things like children's education and old-age pensions and healthcare and so on. | |
| That if they're capable of doing this, they're not really the first place you want to go to solve social problems. | |
| But that really goes against our whole propaganda about, you know, we need the state. | |
| The state is good. | |
| Without the state, everything would be terrible. | |
| So I think it contradicts people's beliefs about that, too. | |
| Well, certainly spending trillions abroad squandering all the money and having none to build up this country is a huge problem. | |
| Thank you so much, Stefan Molyneux, Free Domain Radio. | |
| Everyone check it out. | |
| Thanks so much for coming on. |