STAYING POWER: THE HARMFUL IDIOTS V. THE RESISTANCE.

second ver y rrr oughand pollenfilleddraft. Culprit: oaktrees.

As a follow-up on a section in the last post ("Arab Blood and Saudi Greed") about comparative cost, I looked up some of the known estimates of the cost of the Iraq occupation.

BILMES/STIGLITZ AND THE CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE (CBO)

For the years between 2003 and 2016, Linda Bilmes and Jospeph E. Stiglitz (Nobel laureate economist) estimated late last year that the war could cost anywhere between $2 trillion and $2, 262 trillion.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for the same period (2003-2016), in the summer of last year, estimated that the Iraq war would cost anywhere between $493 billion and $697 billion.

I didn’t delve into the details on how each team had eached these figures. My aim was to develop a general idea about how much each U.S. soldier in the field costs per month, and to compare this to the seemingly paltry amount a resistance fighter costs. I did this to unravel the most important element in assessing staying power. One of course should keep in mind that casualties, though tragic, especially that they are the result of harmful ideological and biased impulse, in the end are translated into dollars in the United States.

The fact that the estimates for the cost of the American troops probably include health care for the disabled is of little effect. In other words, the argument that such expense should not be considered in comparing the cost of the resistance against the cost of the occupation, is a non-starter. Cost is cost. A disabled resistance fighter has his family and clan to care for him, imperfectly, on the cheap. There’s no government to speak of, so family and clan will have to do it. And maybe the mosque.

In contrast, an American soldier has a government to speak of. This government will have to attend to her needs, when disabled. The family is too busy consuming and paying taxes so that the harmful idiots can make a naked grab for another country’s oil and make Israel safe; and the clan in America had ceased to exist, while the church (the mosque) is preoccupied with pushing along reproduction, not very successfully.

THE MONTHLY COST OF THE RESISTANCE FIGHTER

I don’t have figures for the cost of the resistance. I have an idea based on my observation of Syrian troops in Lebanon where it was accepted that they didn’t make much–$30 to $60 per month, around ten years ago. In contrast, to make the point, a Lebanese soldier, working for a bankrupt state, was making about $300 per month.

One can safely estimate that the pay for the Iraqi resistance fighter is comparable to that of the Syrian soldier, and less to that of the Lebanese. But since we have a dollar glut, itself a major cause of imperial weakness that hadn't been accounted for by the Arab and Muslim-hating crowd of the Jewish right, its liberal adorers, and the Evangelical crusaders, we can be more generous in our estimate and hypothesize that the resistance fighter is costing $300 per month.

Not to belittle a major incentive: This is the resistance fighter’s war, not the American soldier’s. Let ‘s not forget. If anything, to travel from Morocco to Iraq to blow oneself up places the resistance fighter outside this capitalist reasoning altogether.

THE MONTHLY COST OF AN AMERICAN SOLDIER IN THE FIELD

Using both the CBO’s figure and that of Bilmes/Stiglitz, we can estimate that the war will cost between a minimum of $493 billion (CBO’s minimum) and a maximum of $2, 262 trillion (Bilmes/Stiglitz’s maximum). I’ll pick a figure in-between these two: $1, 4 trillion for a total of 13 years (2003-2016)

Per year, the cost should be $1,4 trillion/13years= @ $100billion.

$100 billion, yearly cost , divided by 12 month= @ $8,3 billion–the monthly cost.

Fighting in Iraq is somewhere between 150,000 and 175,000 troops. Let’s say 165,000 as an average

$8,3 billion, cost per month, divided by 165,000 troops= @ $ 50,000.

SUMMARY: COST PER MONTH:

Iraqi resistance fighter: $300 (three hundred dollars and no.)

U.S. soldier: $ 50,000 (Fifty thousand dollars and no.)