News Analysis - The cost of the 'war on terror'
WORKERS, DEC 2006 ISSUE
The US and British states are using 60,000 mercenaries in Iraq, described by US senators as the 'largest private army in the world'. They have so far cost more than $1 billion. The Bush and Blair governments protect them from any regulation, encouraging them to commit abuses. There are almost 21,000 British 'private security guards' in Iraq, three times the number of British troops. These 'security' companies are making vast amounts of money from the war. Aegis Defence Services (UK), for example, increased its turnover from £554,000 before the war to £62 million last year.
Iraq has paid £21 billion in 'war reparations' to some of the world's richest states and companies. The USA and Saudi Arabia have both gained, as have corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, Mobil and Shell. Kentucky Fried Chicken and Toys R Us have also received compensation, for a 'decline in business' due to the war!
This sum is far greater than Iraq's annual budgets for health and education combined. Payments are, not surprisingly, well behind schedule and will continue for years, so Iraq has to borrow from the IMF, with all the hardships entailed.
Afghan officials report that NATO forces killed 85 Afghan civilians in the district of Panjwayi near Kandahar on 25 October. A NATO spokesman said that NATO always used 'precision strikes'.
No picnic
General the Lord Guthrie, who retired as Chief of the Defence Staff five years ago, said, "Anyone who thought this was going to be a picnic in Afghanistan, anyone who had read any history, anyone who knew the Afghans, or had seen the terrain, anyone who had thought about the Taliban resurgence, anyone who understood what was going on across the border in Baluchistan and Waziristan [should have known that] to launch the British army in with the numbers there are, while we're still going on in Iraq, is cuckoo."
Authorised by the White House, the CIA has transported hundreds of prisoners to foreign jails to face torture, endless interrogations and detention without charge. Now the CIA has stifled the feeble EU criticism of its secret rendition flights by offering Germany access to a German al-Qaeda suspect being held in Morocco. In return, Berlin agreed to help with 'averting pressure from the EU' over Morocco's human rights abuses. Subsequently, all the EU countries have muted criticism of the torture practised in countries where terrorist suspects are held, including Poland, Rumania, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. They have also sidestepped questions about the CIA flights, partly because of the growing evidence of their own complicity.
Blair assured Parliament, "I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has been happening here at all." But records show that more than 200 CIA flights have passed through Britain, including a CIA Gulfstream V jet which flew prisoners to Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean Territory where the USA has a large detention centre.