a rebuttal to a rebuttal.

be fore you read my rebuttal, you should probably read the article here.

Mr. Hitchens goes to great lengths to try and shoot holes in the argument of Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stigliz, but makes no real point in his article, despite the title which might lead someone to believe that the struggle in Iraq is entirely worth the $12 billion a month we are currently spending and all that we have already spent.

Hitchens asserts in his article that Iraq was not a war of choice. well i personally havent seen a real reason for it yet. and he presented nothing new. nothing at all really. people have said that Saddam was a despot, but such was the case when we funded him in fighting Iran, was it not? i heard that he had weapons of mass destruction. we all did. then we found out that was entirely false. sure intelligence is not infallible, but it should be damn accurate when thousands of American, and many fold Iraqi citizens', lives are at stake. am i wrong?

his next argument is that the article he is picking apart contains the flawed logic that they only calculated the cost of the war and didnt compare it to the cost of not going to war and imposing diplomatic and military measures to cripple and oust Saddam. i have to say that Mr Hitchens is correct on this point. But i can counter that a couple of ways.

first, the war, including indirect costs, all of which is in the original article that Hitchens attacks, has cost the US $3 trillion dollars. 3 trillion. THREE FUCKING TRILLION. there is no way that embargoes, enforcing no fly zones, restricting trade and dimplomacy could have come close to that figure. thats almost a quarter of the total US gross domestic product last year. im sure that has nothing to do with the looming r-word.

second, and more importantly than any monetary amount, Hitchens completely fails to take the human cost into account. tell any soldier's young widow that the war is worth the cost, worth her husband dying, and see what she says. look a dead soldier's mother in the eye and tell her that her child's life is just the price we have to pay. and pay for what, i might add. anarchy?

Hitchens also addresses the costs of keeping Saddam in power, which i havent seen any figures on, he is quite correct in that. i want to emphasize at this point that i in no way sympathize with Saddam Hussein. he was a terrible person and ran a ruthless cold blooded government that repressed, tortured and slaughtered its own people. its hard to know when to get involved. and in this case even worse because of the way the US once supported and funded the same man that we effectively brought to the gallows. at what point do we say that you cannot behave in that same way that you did and that we funded you to do? why, after years of this, did the US deem it necessary to end it and send to the slaughter our own men and women?

he next asks that we take into account the value that the future independent Iraq will be a third party to the petroleum duopoly of Saudi Arabia and Iran. talk about counting your chickens before they hatch. plus, those chickens arent even ours. and who says that Iraq is going to look favorably on us whenever they come to run their country and oil. there will be people who have grown up entirely under US occupation and relative anarchy. i doubt that their view of the US will be all that magnanimous. and i thought this war wasnt about the oil...

next, Hitchens notes that our troops have gained valuable experience in fighting terrorist groups such as Al-Queada. sure they have. but i doubt that would be nearly as big of concern had we not sent the country and region into anarchy. plus, where are his calculations on how many troops have lost their lives to IEDs, guerrilla attacks, and suicide bombers in the process? learning to fight a foe that we in large part created with the Iraq war is circular logic at its best. to expand an analogy i have used before, this logic is like repeatedly shitting in youre bed, then saying that doing this has allowed you to become very good at cleaning up shit in your bed.

Mr Hitchens completes his article by making fun of Bilmes and Stigliz. and while i cannot say that they were entirely correct in their calculations, it just seems like a low blow. he then suggests that all the money that Obama and Clinton have raised should be used to help resolve poverty, which is again a low blow at the left, and a surprisingly civic minded thing to come from such a right side voice.

ill end by saying that Hitchens is dead on in that most war cost calculations fail to take into account a cost of other options. but he, and we, must acknowledge that war is an expensive proposition. that there is no way that no war is more expensive that a prolonged war that adds $13 TRILLION every month. i certainly cannot say that anything we have achieved there has been worth the loss in life. there is no way that this war in Iraq has been worth it. no way.