It is this reporter’s opinion that as the Iraq war grinds into its sixth year at a cost of approximately $340 million per year, we may better understand where we are, where we have been, and where we are going thanks to a book by four brilliant journalists.
If you have not already read these fine books, add them to your must-read list:
"The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict" by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, published by W.W. Norton, March 2008
"Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq" by Jonathan Steele, published by Counterpoint, Feb. 2008
"Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed are Tearing America Apart" by Patrick Buchanan, published by Thomas Dunne Books, Nov.2007
"Economic Facts and Fallacies" by Thomas Sowell, Basic Books, Dec. 2007
As one who opposed George Bush’s pre-emptive war in Iraq from its beginning, all four books document the tragic price we have paid in lives and long-term costs we will face for decades to come. We have now been in this endless fiasco in the Middle East a year longer than World War II. All four books leave us with a bleak economic, military, and political future.
In Steele’s "Defeat," we were told by the Bush administration that Iraq would welcome us as liberators.
However, this debacle has not brought the democracy promised for the Middle East, but only mistrust of the West by Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world.
My good friend, Dr. Thomas Sowell, writes a book designed for those of us who want to understand economic issues without becoming bogged down in economists’ jargon or political rhetoric.
These are among the many issues Sowell raises in the book:
Affordable housing
The reasons for male-female differences in income
Why the rich continue becoming richer and the poor getting poorer, and why the middle class is vanishing
The lucrative severance packages “golden parachutes” arranged for CEOs who have clearly failed
What explains the huge disparity in income between the most prosperous nations and the most desperately poor Third World nations
Why the most basic facts and economic issues have been ignored in both politics and the media with the results that fallacies have flourished
All four books explain our grievances and gratitudes found only in the most powerful nation on the face of our earth.
This is one reporter’s opinion. We welcome yours.
Listen to George Putnam at www.CRNTALK.com.
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