Joseph Stiglitz iraq war cost part 3

http://www.interest.co.nz

The real cost of the Iraq war
I'm Bernard Hickey and welcome to www.interest.co.nz 's second exclusive interview with a newsmaker. Earlier this month we spoke Reserve Bank of New Zealand governor Alan Bollard.
Here we talk to Professor Joseph Stiglitz. He is a Columbia University professor and a Nobel Prize winner in economics who has co-written a book tallying up the true cost of the Iraq War to US taxpayers and the US economy. The book titled the Three Trillion Dollar War explains how the 5 year old war was expected to cost US$50 billion and has instead ended up costing at least US$3 trillion. The direct costs of the destroyed equipment and spending in Iraq is added to the growing medical costs for injured veterans, along with the massive macroeconomic costs of higher oil prices.
Stiglitz details how this surge of deficit-funded cash and wasteful spending has distorted global financial markets, helping create the global credit crunch that this week claimed Bear Stearns.
He goes on to say that the US Federal Reserve's move to rescue Bear Stearns creates a dangerous precedent and adds to a growing "Moral Hazard" on Wall St that investors can always rely on the US Federal Reserve to bail them out of bad lending and investing decisions.
He worries about the future of financial markets and cautions that other unnamed banks are also rumoured to be in trouble.
Stiglitz finishes by saying the Fed's liquidity pump is helping to strip the US dollar of its status as a reserve currency.
Stiglitz was in New Zealand to promote the book at the International Festival of the Arts at its Readers and Writers week. He spoke in Auckland on Tuesday night.

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[suntzu1985]

actually none of the above!!

you have nothing of relevance to the issue at hand. you are just as closed minded as the militant extremists found throughout the middle east with their heads in the sand or up their arse!!

[ThatIsNotDeadWhich]

Should I take that to mean that you do not have references to supply, or that you are unwilling to supply them?

In either case, I suppose that would exhaust the value of this conversation.

[suntzu1985]

there is a saying in the middle east and it goes somthing like this.

do not bore me with your 'Facts', i have already made up my mind.

this is indicative of the close-minded mindset prevalent throughout much of the middle east an in particular of the murderous, homicidal and suicidal facist organizations waging terrorism upon Israel and the Western world.

in other words, you cannot argue with an

Asshole because the more you argue the tighter he gets, and in this case is it You

QED

[ThatIsNotDeadWhich]

Projecting much?

Well, if my contributions are so full of lies and falsehoods, why don't you point out one? Should be easy enough to do, right?

So far, the closest you've come to citing specifics is your denial that Al Fatah was originally a semi-Marxist organisation. Which is curious, because all mainstream sources I've been able to find call it centre-left nationalist.

So where did you get your information?

[suntzu1985]

you simply do not understand and as such you deserve pity because you know not what you do.

so go run away little boy/girl and do your cockroach errands for the iblis worshippers in the satanic and death worshipping cults of islum.

you simply bore me with your erroneous rantings of lies, falsehoods, and untruths.

[ThatIsNotDeadWhich]

RFTM

The PLO (or rather, Fatah, which has long been the main faction of the PLO) was originally a Marxist organisation. It doesn't get more secular than that. The Al Aqsa Brigades are a group of militias loosely connected to Fatah in much the same way that the IRA was loosely connected to Sinn Fein.

And Saddam Hussein certainly didn't finance Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shiite militia supported by Iran. Iran and Saddam Hussein were enemies, and the Baath party were secular Sunnis.

[suntzu1985]

actually it is very clear ALL of these groups have a murderous and homicidal fascination with death and murder. the plo is NOT secular it is a terrorist group of extremists led by murderous thugs. al aqsa martyrs brigade is also a murderous organization of death dealers as well.

the ONE thing they all have in common is the spread of their murderous ideology of hate and murder. something for which the now dead saddam hussein was happy to finance!

[ThatIsNotDeadWhich]

The groups on your list have only two things in common - that they are more or less opposed to US policy on the Arabian peninsula and the immediate environs and that they are more or less Muslim (and the PLO and Al Aqsa Brigades are not even that - they're mostly secular).

Your statement is akin to lumping together Augusto Pinochet (a Catholic fascist) and Martin Luther (a Protestant theologian) because "they're both Christians."

And you still haven't told us what it has to do with Iraq...

[suntzu1985]

once again an apoligist for militant islamo facist terrorists trying to obfuscate the FACTS that ALL islamo facist terroristic groups have one thing in common. this extremism is marked by death, destruction and impoverishment of their own people in misery all due to their own hatred.

actually it is very simple, they all hate and when they hate others ( Israelis ) more than they love their own children, especially when they poison their children's minds with hate, only death will result.

[ThatIsNotDeadWhich]

I must confess to some puzzlement as to the relevance of Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian and Palestinian militias to the war in Iraq.

That aside, you are gravely amiss in lumping together these organisations as if they were a monolithic entity. They have different histories, tactics and objectives.

Hamas is basically the Palestinian version of Likud, but with a much better social profile. (Fun fact: Hamas was initially sponsored by Israel and the US as a counterweight against the PLO).