Re: the fruits of a US interventionist policy

With just over three months left until the last U.S. troops leave
Iraq, the Department of Defense is engaged in a mad dash to give away
things that cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars to buy and build.

The giveaways include enormous, elaborate military bases and vast
amounts of military equipment that will be turned over to the Iraqis,
mostly just to save the expense of bringing it home.

"It's all sunk costs," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who
oversaw the training of Iraqi soldiers from 2003 to 2004. "It's money
that we spent and we're not going to recoup."

There were 505 U.S. military bases and outposts in Iraq at the height
of operations, said Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for U.S. forces in
Iraq. Only 39 are still in U.S. hands -- but that includes each of the
largest bases, meaning the most significant handovers are yet to come.

Those bases didn't come cheap. Construction costs exceeded $2.4
billion, according to an analysis of Pentagon annual reports by the
Congressional Research Service. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers alone
was responsible for $1.9 billion in base construction contracts
between 2004 and 2010, a spokesman told HuffPost.

The most colossal relics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq will be the
outsize military bases the Bush administration began erecting not long
after the invasion, under the never explicitly stated assumption that
Iraq would become the long-term staging area for U.S. forces in the
region. The Huffington Post

FACTS & FIGURES

Officials in Washington say President Barack Obama is willing to keep
between 3,000 and 10,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. NPR

The U.S. embassy in Baghdad - already the world's largest - has been
expanding as the U.S. transitions from a military to a civilian-led
mission in Iraq. Al Jazeer

The State Department plans to field 5,500 private security contractors
to protect up to 17,000 civilians working for the American government
in Iraq. Wired.com

Defense contractors have wasted or lost to fraud as much as $60bn over
the past 10 years, according to a report released on August 31 by the
Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ft.com

The latest objective estimate for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
made public June 29, is between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion,
according to the research project "Costs of War" by Brown University's
Watson Institute for International Studies. The Prison Planet

As of December 2010, security contractor personnel made up 22% of all
Department of Defense' contractors and was equal to 20% of the size of
total U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. Scribd.com

On Sep 26, 11:38 am, plainolamerican <plainolameri...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> An Afghan employed by the U.S. government killed one American and
> wounded another in an attack on a CIA office in Kabul
>
> http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/american-killed-kabul-a...

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