De Oorlogsstaat 37

De Engelstalige editie van Der Spiegel bevat een interview met Nobelprijswinnaar Joseph Stiglitz. 'Trillion Dollar War ."The War Is Bad for the Economy" Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, 63, discusses the true $1 trillion cost of the Iraq conflict, its impact on the oil market and the questions of whether the West can afford to impose sanctions on Iran. Professor Stiglitz, at the beginning of the Iraq war, the United States administration was hoping to almost break even in terms of the costs ...Stiglitz: ... they truly believed the Iraqi people could use their oil revenues to pay for reconstruction.SPIEGEL: And now you are estimating the cost of war at levels between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. How do you explain this difference?Stiglitz: First, the war was much more difficult than President Bush and his government expected. They thought they were going to walk in, everybody would say thank you, and they would set up a democratic government and leave. Now that this war is lasting so much longer, they constantly have to adapt their budget. It rose from $50 billion to $250 billion. Today, the Congressional Budget Office talks about $500 billion or more for this adventure. SPIEGEL: That's still by far lower than your own calculations.Stiglitz: The reported numbers do not even include the full budgetary costs to the government. And the budgetary costs are but a fraction of the costs to the economy as a whole. And compare this to Gulf War number one, where America almost made a profit!SPIEGEL: Because Germany paid for it?Stiglitz: Because Germans paid, because everybody paid. We got our allies to pay full price for used equipment, and we got to refurbish our military. This time, most of the other countries were not willing to do so again.SPIEGEL: Did Bush just miscalculate, or was he misleading the public about the true costs of war?Stiglitz: I think it was both. He wanted to believe it was not going to be expensive, he wanted to believe it would be easy. But there's also enormous evidence now that information channels into the White House were distorted. Bush wanted only certain information, and that's mostly what they supplied him with. Larry Lindsey ...SPIEGEL: ... the White House's former top economic adviser ...Stiglitz: ... gave -- back in 2002 -- a number of up to $200 billion. I think that was the most accurate inside information at the time. He was dismissed. They didn't want to hear it.' Lees verder: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,409710,00.html Of:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12634.htm