The price of the Bush presidency six years after 9/11
New York. As General David Petraeus, the top US. Military Commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, made on September 10 2007 the case for the troops surge in Baghdad , the.point.is news agency has decided to look at the price of the war and at the consequences of the Bush administration policies. So far, 3754 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq and more than 27000 have been wounded according to U.S. Department of Defense. Between 71,510 and 78,081 Iraqis have died according to the Iraq Body Count. An investigation led by AP shows that brain injuries are a problem for U.S. soldiers returning from the war. Several thousand troops have been treated for traumatic brain injury (TBI) and thousands more are believed to suffer from it. In 2004, the.point.is. news agency reported on the case of Tyler Hall, a then 24-year-old soldier from Alaska. During one convoy mission near Kirkuk on August 22 2003, Hall’s unit was hit with an explosive. Tyler does not remember much of the “few seconds that changed my life more than a hundred years”. He stopped breathing eight times and was even pronounced dead. At the time of the interview, his mother Kim explained that Tyler suffered from attention deficit disorder and had trouble focusing. Thousands of soldiers are now in a similar situation all over the US. The war in Iraq has already cost $450 billion dollars according to the National Priorities Project, a research organization based in Massachusetts that analyzes federal data. The group said the U.S. government could have hired 7,800 additional public teachers for a year for that price. On Monday September 10, Gen. David Petraeus said that the troop surge in Iraq ordered earlier this year by George Bush, had met its military objectives “in large measure.” He added that he envisions the withdrawal of roughly 30,000 U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the summer of 2008. Former soldiers and officers are very skeptical. On Thursday Sept. 6, Major Gen. John Batiste, former commander of the First infantry division in Iraq, testified in Congress. His assessment of the surge is bleak. “Despite the unbelievable performance of our military, the current “surge” in Iraq is too little, too late”, Mr. Batiste said in his statement. “The so-called surge really amounted to nothing more than a minor reinforcement, a number, which represented all that our military could muster at the time”. The former Major General added that “the current administration drove this nation to war without the military planning and capability required to be successful” and that “the number of Iraqi civilians killed in July 2007 was higher than in February 2007 when the surge began”. The Petraeus report did not convince the Democrats pushing for a troop withdrawal from Iraq. Some lawmakers had already started questioning his independence the day before he was due to testify in Congress. Speaking on the television program Fox News Sunday, Senator Dianne of California said she does not think the report’s author U.S. Army General David Petraeus is an “independent evaluator” of the Iraq situation. In a speech on Friday September 7 at the Center for National Policy in Washington, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.,suggested the White House is twisting the facts to reach its desired conclusion. Gen. Petraeus rebutted that charge in his testimony: “I wrote this testimony myself, he said. It has not been cleared by nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or the Congress.” In Afghanistan, the first front of the war on terror after 9/11, fight is raging and nobody in Washington can even think of withdrawing US troops from there. Two British soldiers and 30 suspected militants were killed last weekend in southern Afghanistan. The deaths bring to 78 the number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led invasion of the country toppled the Taliban regime. The British forces are shifting some of their military capability from southern Iraq to Afghanistan. Washington has spent an average of $3.4 billion a year reconstructing Afghanistan, less than half of what it has spent in Iraq, according to the Congressional Research Service. All in all, the White House has spent $19 billion in aid reconstruction to Afghanistan. But nn investigation published by the New York Times in August 2007, showed that the Bush administration diverted precious resources from Afghanistan to Iraq. The White House contends that the troop level in Afghanistan was increased when needed and that it now stands at 23,500. But a senior American commander quoted by the Times said that the effort was not enough. The Bush administration has enjoyed limited success in its fight against international terrorism. The U.S. has not been the target of another major attack since 9/11. Many Al Qaeda leaders and operatives such as Sheikh Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Ramzi Binalshib have been caught. But Bin Laden, the world’s most-wanted terrorist is still at large. This week end, the Al Qaeda leader tried to rally his supporters with the release of a new. On September 9, Frances Townsend, President Bush’s domestic security adviser dismissed Osama bin Laden as “virtually impotent.” But in mid-July, a grim intelligence estimate released by White House showed the Bush administration strategy for fighting Osama bin Laden’s leadership of Al Qaeda in Pakistan had failed. The National Intelligence Estimate, which represents the consensus view of all 16 agencies that make up the American intelligence community, concluded that US is losing ground in fight against Al Qaeda and described the terrorist network as having significantly strengthened over past two years. Jean-Cosme Delaloye / New York >A shorter French version of this story was published on September 10 in Tribune de Genève and 24heures in Switzerland. CommentsYou must be logged in to post a comment. |
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