Worth the Price?

Trey Smith

It is now estimated by Iraq Body Count that at least 125,000 Iraqi civilians were killed from 2003 - 2011. Of course, that's the minimum number. I'm sure many deaths went unrecorded and unacknowledged in official reports. While President Obama, military leaders and our congressional representatives have told us that the war on Iraq was worth its costs, I wonder how many Iraqi families would agree with that assessment.

As we now know, the invasion of Iraq was never about weapons of mass destruction. It was far more about oil and the transfer of large sums of American taxpayer dollars to some of the biggest and wealthiest corporations on the planet. As with most wars or invasions, economics -- for the elite minority -- always plays a huge role in the decision to attack. If it looks like they can make a killing -- a sad pun, but oh so true -- then the war is on for sure.

One statistic that I have not seen is how much each mega corporation made off of the war in Iraq from beginning to end. I bet many companies were handed staggering profits. Now that we have a ballpark figure on Iraqi civilian deaths (not all at the hands of US or coalition forces), what I'd really like to see is how much revenue each death generated.

Since it's been reported that trillions of taxpayer dollars landed in the pockets of corporations connected to America's vast military-industrial complex, I'd guess that each civilian death was "offset" by several million dollars of revenue for someone.

I simply cannot fathom how the CEOs and senior management of these leeching corporations can look themselves in the mirror or go to sleep at night without waking from horrid nightmares. Their vast riches came at the expense of innocent men, women and children who were slaughtered for no good reason.