:: Da' Militant One's Lair ::

:: Thursday, July 10, 2003 ::

Memo to Sheep:

Guess how much money was allocated by Congress for military operations in Iraq in the recently passed defense authorization bill? Let's go to the video tape:

More Bad News from today's Washington Post

In its most detailed assessment of the cost of the war, the Pentagon said it has already incurred $900 million in unanticipated personnel costs and about $4.1 billion in weapons depot maintenance costs that are "beyond the scope of the . . . programs to absorb." An additional $612 million in family separation allowances and imminent danger pay demanded by Congress will also have to be covered by shifting funds from other accounts.

The military hopes to spend $232 million to replace Air Force transport equipment, $217 million to buy new Tomahawk cruise missiles, $638 million on munitions, $389 million to convert Chinook helicopters for special operations, and $109 million to upgrade Army combat missile systems. And those are only the preliminary assessments of equipment loss, the report cautioned.

The House this week approved a $369 billion defense spending bill that includes no money for military operations in Iraq, a move that "is very hard to understand or explain," said Thomas Kahn, the Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee.

Defense Department officials remained sanguine about the long-term issues. The report to Congress continued to predict that "only a limited number of U.S. forces will remain" in Iraq by fall 2004.

END

Did you get that? Zero dollars! No money, no rebuilding, no weapons of mass destruction. Twelve hundred U.S. military casualties. Well at least we got rid of Saddam, right? He was a tyrant and a murderer, right? That's why we went to war, right? The Iraqis are better off, right? American troops are only being killed by Saddam loyalists, right? We did the right thing all the way around didn't we?

What if we had not cooked the evidence and stuck to what we knew? What if we had let the weapons inspectors finish their jobs? What if we had listened to our friends save for France and had more patience? Didn't Canada in March right before the war started want to give the inspections only two additional weeks? Was Iraq really an imminent threat? Was it all worth it? Didn't our soldiers deserve straight talk? Were all the embellishments neccesary? Let's ask the families of the dead soldiers because they can no longer speak for themselves. Peace

:: DM1 7/10/2003 07:14:00 PM [+] ::
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