Montana’s Peace Groups Mark the Fifth Anniversary of the Iraq War

Members of the Montana Peace Seekers Network will mark the tragic fifth
anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq with visits to the offices of
Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester and Representative Dennis Rehberg in
Helena on Wednesday, March 19.  They invite the public to join in delivering
a prepared statement to the congressmen countering their justifications and
dogged support for funding the violent U. S. occupation of Iraq.

With a “please change your tune” theme, peace seekers will gather outside
the office of Senator Baucus in the Great Northern complex. They will
deliver both formal and personal statements to Senator Baucus’ staff at 2
pm.  Then the group will proceed to Congressman Rehberg’s office at 3 p.m,
and on to Senator Testers office at 4 p.m..

A public rally will follow at 5 p.m. at the corner of Broadway and Sixth on
the NW corner of the state capitol grounds.

A dozen representatives of Montanans Support our Troops and Withdrawal from
Iraq, MSTWI, met privately with Senator Baucus on January 7 and with Senator
Tester on January 17. They requested that the senators vote to de-fund the
occupation and begin withdrawal of combat troops. They also asked the
senators to recognize publicly that five Montana cities had approved Iraq
withdrawal resolutions or popular votes with significant majorities.

As the occupation enters its sixth year, approximately 130,000 service
personnel and a similar number of support contractors are in Iraq. The
Defense Department recognizes 3,987 deaths of US soldiers since the “shock
and awe” campaign began on March 19, 2003. Montanans have suffered 22 of the
dead and 235 of the wounded.

Deborah Hayden, mother of a crippled Iraq veteran, said, “This is a good
opportunity for ordinary citizens to get involved in urging our
congressional delegation to take a stand against funding the ongoing
violence.  It has been, and continues to be, far too expensive in lives lost
and broken and resources squandered, resources and lives desperately needed
at home.”

Activities start at Senator Max Baucus’s office, 30 W. 14th St. followed by
visits to Representative, Denny Rehberg’s office, 950 N. Montana Ave., and
Senator Jon Tester’s office, 208 N. Montana Avenue.

At 5 pm the general public is invited to join peace seekers from across

Montana on the corner of 6th and Montana for a press conference and rally to
mark the 5th anniversary of the unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Iraq.

Also, please take the time to read the following article about the cost of this war. If you can’t get the final pages, just go to our link to The Nation and finish it there

The Wages of Peace

ROBERT POLLIN & HEIDI GARRETT-PELTIER

There is no longer any doubt that the Iraq War is a moral and strategic disaster for the United States. But what has not yet been fully recognized is that it has also been an economic disaster. To date, the government has spent more than $522 billion on the war, with another $70 billion already allocated for 2008.

With just the amount of the Iraq budget of 2007, $138 billion, the government could instead have provided Medicaid-level health insurance for all 45 million Americans who are uninsured. What’s more, we could have added 30,000 elementary and secondary schoolteachers and built 400 schools in which they could teach. And we could have provided basic home weatherization for about 1.6 million existing homes, reducing energy consumption in these homes by 30 percent.

But the economic consequences of Iraq run even deeper than the squandered opportunities for vital public investments. Spending on Iraq is also a job killer. Every $1 billion spent on a combination of education, healthcare, energy conservation and infrastructure investments creates between 50 and 100 percent more jobs than the same money going to Iraq. Taking the 2007 Iraq budget of $138 billion, this means that upward of 1 million jobs were lost because the Bush Administration chose the Iraq sinkhole over public investment.

Recognizing these costs of the Iraq War is even more crucial now that the economy is facing recession. While a recession is probably unavoidable, its length and severity will depend on the effectiveness of the government’s stimulus initiatives. By a wide margin, the most effective stimulus is to expand public investment projects, especially at the state and local levels. The least effective fiscal stimulus is the one crafted by the Bush Administration and Congress–mostly to just send out rebate checks to all taxpayers. This is because a high proportion of the new spending encouraged by the rebates will purchase imports rather than financing new jobs in the United States, whereas public investment would concentrate job expansion within the country. Combining this Bush stimulus initiative with the ongoing spending on Iraq will only deepen the severity of the recession.

Is Militarism Necessary for Prosperity?

The government spent an estimated $572 billion on the military in 2007. This amounts to about $1,800 for every resident of the country. That’s more than the combined GDPs of Sweden and Thailand, and eight times federal spending on education.

The level of military spending has risen dramatically since 2001, with the increases beginning even before 9/11. As a share of GDP, the military budget rose from 3 percent to 4.4 percent during the first seven years of the Bush presidency. At the current size of the economy, a difference between a military budget at 4.4 rather than 3 percent of GDP amounts to $134 billion.

The largest increases in the military budget during the Bush presidency have been associated with the Iraq War. Indeed, the $138 billion spent on Iraq in 2007 was basically equal to the total increase in military spending that caused the military budget to rise to 4.4 percent of GDP. It is often argued that the military budget is a cornerstone of the economy–that the Pentagon is a major underwriter of important technical innovations as well as a source of millions of decent jobs. At one level these claims are true. When the government spends upward of $600 billion per year of taxpayers’ money on anything, it cannot help but generate millions of jobs. Similarly, when it spends a large share of that budget on maintaining and strengthening the most powerful military force in the history of the world, this cannot fail to encourage technical innovations that are somehow connected to the instruments of warfare.

Yet it is also true that channeling hundreds of billions of dollars into areas such as renewable energy and mass transportation would create a hothouse environment supporting new technologies. For example, utilities in Arizona and Nevada are developing plans to build “concentrated” solar power plants, which use the sun to heat a liquid that can drive a turbine. It is estimated that this technology, operating on a large scale, could drive down the costs of solar electricity dramatically, from its current level of about $4 per watt to between $2.50 and $3 per watt in the sunniest regions of the country. At these prices, solar electricity becomes much cheaper than oil-driven power and within range of coal. These and related technologies could advance much more rapidly toward cost competitiveness with coal, oil and nuclear power if they were to receive even a fraction of the subsidies that now support weapons development (as well as the oil industry).

PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 NEXT
Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!

If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.