For the GOP It's 1933 Déjà vu All Over Again

As if the economic news weren't bad enough and getting worse at the moment, with analysis of the near future looking grim, unemployment numbers rising and consumer spending tanking, you'd think a little common sense might kick in somewhere in the GOP. Maybe restoring government regulation and enforcement to combat fraud, deceit and outright bilking and a economic stimulus package might make sense. Right?

Wrong - The fact is, facts simply aren't relevant to Republicans, whose unquestioning adherence to dogma, unyielding opposition to FDR's "New Deal" reforms and veneration of conservative icons such as Ronald Reagan are more appropriate to religious faith than intellectual rigor.

Rather than accept responsibility for the many catastrophes conservative governance and the repeal of FDR's "New Deal" reforms, have foisted upon the nation, Republicans seek to deny blame; President Bush says the Wall Street meltdown isn't his fault, as he tells Charles Gibson,

"I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made took place over a decade or so, before I arrived."

Well, to be completely accurate, Bush's conservative legacy of failure directly follows from the conservative prime ideological directive, so well articulated by Ronald Reagan upon his inauguration on January 20, 1981, that "Government is not the solution; government is the problem." What has happened over the last eight years links up to what has been happening over the last twenty-eight years, since Ronald Reagan's inaugural call to dismantle government.

By the time Ronald Reagan was elected president conservative Republicans had spent 50 years unsuccessfully trying to sell Americans on the idea that conservative governance in the 1920's had nothing to do with the economic crisis of the 1930's and that the U.S. economy—whether in recession or booming—was laboring under the shackles of the burdensome taxation and misguided regulation placed upon it by FDR's enduring New Deal legislation.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. writes about FDR's challenges to rescue America through a "new deal" approach to government in his book, "Crisis of the Old Order,"

"The economy FDR inherited in March 1933, delivered to him by 12 years of Republican laissez-faire rule, was a shambles. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 90 percent from its 1929 peak. and gross domestic product fell by more than a quarter between 1929 and 1933. One out of every four American workers lacked a job, hunger marchers, pinched and bitter, were parading cold streets in New York and Chicago, only a small percentage of the unemployed received relief. Americans suffered a degree of long-term financial distress that is almost unimaginable, but Republicans denied that [the conservative philosophy of] laissez-faire [no government regulation or intervention] governance during the 1920's was in any way responsible for the economic crisis."

From the first days of Roosevelt's Administration in 1933 conservative Republicans have viewed FDR's New Deal programs to regulate banking and Wall Street and protect and empower working class citizens as an extreme threat to their interests. Republicans hated FDR's ideas for financial system regulatory oversight, the Social Security Adminstration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Triborough Bridge program and the Work Projects Administration (WPA) programs.

In the summer of 1933, shortly after Roosevelt's 'First 100 Days,' America's richest businessmen were in a panic. It was clear that Roosevelt intended to push massive "New Deal" economic recovery legislation through congress that would regulate the Banking System and Wall Street and protect and empower working class citizens. Conservatives felt that Roosevelt had to be stopped at all costs and their answer was a political coup, along the lines of the recently successful coups of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. (Hear BBC audio report The White House Coup)

In 1934, Marine Major General Smedley Butler told Congress that a group of wealthy industrialists had approached him to lead a coup to take over the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was to be secretly financed and organized by leading officers of the Morgan and Du Pont empires and included some of America's richest and most famous conservative republicans of the time.

Butler pretended to go along with the plot and met other members of the conspiracy, but in November 1934 Butler exposed the plot in secret testimony to the congressional Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the McCormack-Dickstein Committee) that was investigating Nazi and certain other propaganda activities. Butler claimed that the American Liberty League was the main organization behind the plot. He added the main backers were the Du Pont family, as well as leaders of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Chase National Bank, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Butler also named Prescott Bush, President G.W. Bush's grandfather, as one of the conspirators.

The plot to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt failed when Butler exposed the coup plot, but conservatives have never ceased their effort to overthrow Roosevelt's New Deal regulation of banking and Wall Street and other protections for working class citizens.

In Reagan, conservatives had finally found someone who could successfully sell the conservative "free market" argument against FDR's New Deal philosophy that Government Safety Net Programs and Regulatory Oversight are required to protect working class citizens against catastrophic financial system boom/bust cycles.

During the twenty-eight years following Reagan's inauguration conservatives relentlessly pushed to eliminate government safety net and oversight programs in every corner of America under the canard that "unfettered free markets work best." It was conservatives, both Republican and blue dog Democrat, who pushed repeal and elimination of any and all government safety net and regulatory oversight legislation, following Reagan's inaugural pronouncement.

So, President Bush is correct to say that, "a lot of the decisions were made before I arrived." Yet, it is an ultimate act of denial for Bush to deny that his Blind Conservative Faith In Unregulated Banking And Markets and his directives to oversight agencies that they must not enforce regulations congress had not yet repealed, did in fact stoked our economic crisis.

President Bush is not alone in his denial that the conservative philosophy of governance is the root cause behind the desperate circumstances Americans face today. In their denial many conservatives say that President Bush betrayed conservatism or that President Bush and the Republican leadership in congress were not conservative enough or they lost focus of the "true" core conservative values articulated by President Reagan.

The truth is, President Bush and the Republican leadership in congress faithfully executed both the Republican party’s divisive tactics of political leadership and its governing philosophy. Together they implemented the vision President Reagan articulated in his inauguration speech 28 years ago. And that vision was the repeal of the FDR's New Deal government protections for working class America.

In James K. Galbraith’s book, "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too" Galbraith makes the case that,

America is in the grip of an economic orthodoxy defined by Ronald Reagan and embraced ardently by George W. Bush. This orthodoxy rests on four pillars: 1) Cut taxes on the wealthy, 2) Reduce regulation, 3) Fear inflation above all else, and 4) Insist on free-floating currency rates. Yet mainstream economists have spent much of the past decade examining the results, and declaring them false; Supply-side stimulation is a mirage. In plain English, Galbraith shows that the Republican Party has been hijacked by political leaders who long since stopped caring if their message conforms to reality.

Obama's ambitious plans to repair the American economy have drawn comparison to the massive New Deal reforms and programs pioneered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Conservative Republicans, unable to intellectually accept or unwilling to honestly admit that conservative governance has led to financial calamity twice in a period of 70 years, are signaling that they are as opposed to President Obama's new "New Deal" legislation as their conservative forefathers were to FDR's New Deal legislation.

In recent weeks conservative media figures on TV and radio and conservative Republican lawmakers have attempted to counter media comparisons of Barack Obama to Franklin Roosevelt or assertions in the media that a "New Deal level of government intervention" is necessary to resolve the current economic crisis, by falsely asserting that Roosevelt's New Deal reforms and programs caused the 1930's economy depression. Assertions that the New Deal rather than Republican conservative governance during the 1920's caused the 1930's depression is flatly rejected by economists and historians. New York Times economic writer Daniel Gross debunks these false assertions writing:

It was only with the passage of New Deal efforts--the SEC, the FDIC, the FSLIC--that the mechanisms of private capital began to kick back into gear. Don't take it from me. Take it from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who wrote the following in Essays on the Great Depression: "Only with the New Deal's rehabilitation of the financial system in 1933-35 did the economy begin its slow emergence from the Great Depression."...

The argument that the New Deal's efforts "perhaps had prolonged, the Depression," is a canard. One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian--I mean a serious historian, not a think-tank wanker, not an economist, not a journalist--who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the most powerful conservative Republican in Washington, has said he intends to delay Obama's proposed economic stimulus legislation of $1 trillion in spending and tax cuts by demanding that the Democratically controlled Senate hold lengthy committee hearings. McConnell has the ability to use his 41 Republican Senator cloture vote filibuster to block Obama's legislation, should Democrats not acquiesce to his stall tactics.

GOP House of Representatives minority leader John Boehner is also looking for ways to delay Obama's legislation with lengthy House committee meetings. Boehner is using his website to solicit opposition to Obama's new New Deal saying, "if there are any credentialed economists who are willing to say negative things about stimulus plans, please contact me."

Conservatives in the RNC are also working to exert their influence against Obama's new New Deal with a resolution circulated during the last week of December: (PDF of the resolution.)

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman says, "The New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for FDR’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious." FDR listened too much to conservatives of his day telling him to ease up on the reforms and safety-net programs.

The Republicans have begun their national introspection over the real causes of their electoral wipe out on Nov. 4, with party "leaders" debating how far right - or left - the party needs to go to regain respectable, if not winning, status. Perhaps the fastest path to respectability is for Republicans to accept responsibility for the current economic problems and join Obama in a true bipartisan venture to rebuild America.

Related Links:

• To Conservatives, Obama's Advisers Are Alarmingly Liberal
• Reconstituting Conservative Ideology As Good Governance
• Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism
• A Stake In The Heart Of The Center-Right Hype
• Obama Talks Bipartisan Unity As Republicans Prepare To Bash And Obstruct
• Bush Admin Hamstrung by Conservative "Trickle-Down" Ideology
• The Right Banks On Collective Short-Term Memory Loss for 2012
• Where'd the bailout money go? Shhhh, it's a secret
• GOP Blind Faith In Unregulated Markets Stoked Economic Crisis
• Federal Data Disproves Conservative Spin Democratic Sponsored Minority Lending Cause Of Mortgage Meltdown
• Conservative "Hooverism"
• Reassessing Reagan's "Government Is The Problem" Proclamation
• Republicans Borrow and Spend to Massive Debit

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Reconstituting Conservative Ideology As Good Governance

Bush's conservative legacy of failure follows from a single utterance from Ronald Reagan upon his inauguration on January 20, 1981; "Government is not the solution; government is the problem." What has happened over the last eight years links up to what has been happening over the last twenty-eight years, since Ronald Reagan was elected president.

In the long run, historians will have a very easy time characterizing the failures of the Bush presidency - Bush is a conservative Republican ascending to office with a Congress controlled by conservative Republicans, alongside a judiciary more or less controlled by conservative Republicans, all set in motion by President Reagan.

In the short run, it appears very, very clear that's not stopping conservatives from rewriting history.

NYTimes.com A President Forgotten but Not Gone By FRANK RICH Published: January 3, 2009 [An] elaborate example of legacy spin was placed on the Bush White House Web site before he left office on January 20, 2009: a booklet (PDF) recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.” This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina). If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist. But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews. Asked (by Charles Gibson) if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says, “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” “The attacks of September the 11th came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview, as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of a Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure,” not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds,” that sped us into Iraq.

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, but it is important to remember how vast the wreckage stretches.

HuffingtonPost.com by Brad Woodhouse Posted December 23, 2008 The Bush legacy should be remembered as a grand and failed experiment of what happens when conservatives are in complete control of the government. Conservative ideology rails against government, argues that government is the problem, not the solution. So when a government run by conservatives so utterly fails to promote and protect the common good for all citizens, is it any wonder? And now the same folks that brought us the needless $3 trillion war in Iraq have the mother of all swan songs left in store: redefining the Bush legacy as something other than a failure. Weekly Standard senior writer and GOP insider Stephen Hayes let slip earlier this month that an unofficial White House PR campaign is afoot - which Hayes dubbed the "Bush Legacy project" -- with the mission of highlighting what they believe are the President's accomplishments and shirking responsibility for the more numerous and far more consequential failures. In reality, more than a few people formerly in his administration have come forward as witnesses to a serious failure of leadership. In 1987, President Reagan's job approval rating plummeted to 42 percent during the height of the Iran-Contra scandal. However, in the remaining months of his presidency, Reagan went largely unchecked and managed to leave office with a 63 percent approval rating -- allowing his conservative disciples to redefine his presidency as an example of successful conservative governance. A remarkable feat, to be sure, for a legacy of unhinged deficit spending, draconian cuts in federal assistance to local governments, a homelessness boom, and a refusal to acknowledge the fledgling AIDS epidemic. Reagan got away with repairing his legacy on the way out the door; George W. cannot be allowed to do the same.

In truth, the failures of the last eight years cannot be chalked up to one man. The war in Iraq, the floundering economy, the tragedy that befell New Orleans, were the failures of conservative ideology. The failures are owned by every conservative in Congress who championed and happily rubber-stamped conservative legislation and the conservative philosophy of governing.

The truly compelling story of this decade is one that conservatives do not want told – the rapid and dramatic failure of conservative government. America has learned what life is like under a true conservative government. With near absolute power, conservatives have pursued their agenda with little compromise or input from progressives. In a position of virtually unchecked power conservatives have failed quickly and utterly at the most basic responsibilities of governing, leaving our nation weaker and our people less prosperous, less safe and less free. The Bush years may have been years of political and legislative victories for conservatives, but those years of political and legislative victories have resulted in disastrous conservative governance.

Conservatives in Washington have taken the country on a reckless sharp right turn, offering an economic strategy ill-suited for the challenges we face in the 21st century, a foreign policy too belligerent and too ineffective, and a style of governing too arrogant and corrupt for our proud democracy. Their approach has not only failed to yield the results they've promised, but has endangered America's leadership in the world and broad-based prosperity at home in ways that will take many years to repair.

Conservative leadership in Washington, DC:

• Misled the American people into an endless war in Iraq that has made the United States less safe, has resulted in the death and injury of thousands of American troops and Iraqis, has cost American taxpayers as much as one trillion dollars, has strained our military to the breaking point, and has prevented us from finishing the job in Afghanistan.
• Stood idly by while thousands of Americans lost everything during Hurricane Katrina – and still haven’t taken leadership to rebuild the Gulf Coast and help people return home.
• Allowed trickle-down, laissez-faire (deregulation, anti-regulation, no government regulation or even oversight on anything for any reason, ever, period) economics to help the rich get richer, while regular Americans struggle with soaring gas and food prices, a meltdown in the housing market, and exploding debt during today’s economic recession.
• Turned control of our country’s health care system over to insurance and pharmaceutical companies, leaving millions of Americans incapable of paying for the rising costs of health benefits and turning emergency rooms into primary care physicians.
• Broke their promise to America’s children, failing to fund early education programs and No Child Left Behind.
• Ignored the scientific reality of climate change, obstructing efforts to make our air and water cleaner so oil and gas companies and big business could achieve record profits.
• Turned their backs on America’s workers, assaulting workers’ rights and impeding regular Americans’ efforts to form unions and bargain for better pay and working conditions.
• Conservatives have methodical pursued a campaign to politicize, ignore, twist or undermine science on the effects of smoking and of air pollution, the feasibility and benefits of energy savings through increased energy efficiency standards, the feasibility on deploying alternative energy technologies, stem cell research, educational standards, sex education and contraceptives and the drug abuse, all the way to a campaign aimed at teaching "alternatives to evolution" in the classroom.

We cannot let the conservative version of the past eight years, à la the "Bush Legacy Project," go down in history as the truth. Democrats cannot allow conservatives to reconstitute conservative ideology, as they did for Reagan's presidency, as an approach to government that will ever do more than utterly fail the American people.

"I'm absolutely positive history will be kind to this president, who made the right decisions in a difficult time for this nation," Bush Strategist Karl Rove, 5/7/08

Beware the conservative propaganda machine!

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Politics Is No Longer Local - It's Viral

WashingtonPost.com By Jose Antonio Vargas Sunday, December 28, 2008 It was through news clips posted on YouTube -- and through Obama's YouTube channel, which lists more than 1,800 videos -- that groups [of people] learned about the Illinois senator's policies and positions. And it was mostly on the Internet, in one of those ubiquitous, inescapable Web ads -- the campaign spent $8 million on online advertising -- that they heard about Obama's text-messaging program. "I only get texts from my friends," Andy Green, a 20-year-old sophomore, told me. "Let me correct that: I only get texts from my friends and from Obama." In the past, we've thought of politics as something over there -- isolated, separate from our daily lives, as if on a stage upon which journalists, consultants, pollsters and candidates spun and dictated and acted out the process. Now, because of technology in general and the Internet in particular, politics has become something tangible. Politics is right here. You touch it; it's in your laptop and on your cellphone. You control it, by forwarding an e-mail about a candidate, donating money or creating a group. Politics is personal. Politics is viral. Politics is individual. And we're just getting started. Obama's unprecedented online success guarantees that there's not a single campaign in 2012, Democratic or Republican, that won't place the Web at the core of its operation. The floodgates are open. This doesn't mean just hiring Web developers, bloggers, videographers -- the works. It also means using the Internet to invite people into the process, giving them something to work for, offering them a stake in victory or defeat. More than any other medium in our history, the Web is by the people, for the people. Starting with Howard Dean, continuing with Obama and stretching out into the future, this new dynamic will transform the way campaigns are run -- and, beyond that, the way the winning candidate governs. Fundamentally, all of this is redefining our relationship with our politics. Read the full story at the WashingtonPost.com

Related links:

• Web Based Political Networking

Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders

A 513 page federal history on the Iraq reconstruction was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here. Here are some of the accounts in this first official federal historical document on the Iraq reconstruction entitled “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience" -

• Ignorance: Pentagon planners efforts were crippled by spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.
• Lies: when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures. Colin Powell said the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week"
• Incompetence: The Bush Administration has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.
• Politics over planning: Republicans put a greater priority on making things "look good" for Bush because of the 2004 election instead of efficient and competent use of money. Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority’s abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. “To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,” wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.
• Poor planning: As an example of the haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan.
• Early miscalculations: The history records how Jay Garner, Chief of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, presented Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq. “What do you think that’ll cost?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.“I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,” Mr. Garner said.“My friend,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.”

Conclusions:

"...the government as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy, development and military action all figure.”

And to think in the midst of this recession in America, billions of dollars are flying out of America every week to try to repair the damage of the Bush legacy.

Two economists take an unflinching look at the final costs of invading Iraq in a book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict," by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, and Linda Bilmes, a budget and public finance expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. How do the authors arrive at the $3 trillion figure of the title, and the still bigger numbers they report inside? To the administration's own requests for money they add other costs to the taxpayer that either appear elsewhere in the budget (such as the bonuses required to attract recruits put off by the war) or do not yet appear at all (such as the future disability claims of wounded veterans).

In comparison the $600 billion so far authorized for Iraq is just a down payment of the $3 trillion figure.

Iraq War Results & Statistics at December 10, 2008
4,209 US Soldiers Killed, 30,848 Seriously Wounded
By Deborah White, About.com

For your quick reading, here are key statistics about the Iraq War, taken primarily from data analyzed by various think tanks, including The Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, and from mainstream media sources. Data is presented as of December 10, 2008, except as indicated.

U.S. SPENDING IN IRAQ

• Spent & Approved War-Spending - About $800 billion of US taxpayers' funds spent or approved for spending through mid-2009.
• U.S. Monthly Spending in Iraq - $12 billion in 2008
• U.S. Spending per Second - $5,000 in 2008 (per Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on May 5, 2008)
• Cost of deploying one U.S. soldier for one year in Iraq - $390,000 (Congressional Research Service)
• Lost & Unaccounted for in Iraq - $9 billion of US taxpayers' money and $549.7 milion in spare parts shipped in 2004 to US contractors. Also, per ABC News, 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles.
• Missing - $1 billion in tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces. (Per CBS News on Dec 6, 2007.)
• Mismanaged & Wasted in Iraq - $10 billion, per Feb 2007 Congressional hearings
• Halliburton Overcharges Classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported - $1.4 billion
• Amount paid to KBR, a former Halliburton division, to supply U.S. military in Iraq with food, fuel, housing and other items - $20 billion
• Portion of the $20 billion paid to KBR that Pentagon auditors deem "questionable or supportable" - $3.2 billion
• Number of major U.S. bases in Iraq - 75 (The Nation/New York Times)

TROOPS IN IRAQ

• Iraqi Troops Trained and Able to Function Independent of U.S. Forces - 6,000 as of May 2007 (per NBC's "Meet the Press" on May 20, 2007)
• Troops in Iraq - Total 152,350, including 146,000 from the US, 4,000 from the UK, 900 from Poland, 650 from South Korea and 800 from all other nations
• U.S. Troop Casualties - 4,209 US troops; 98% male. 91% non-officers; 82% active duty, 11% National Guard; 74% Caucasian, 9% African-American, 11% Latino. 19% killed by non-hostile causes. 54% of US casualties were under 25 years old. 72% were from the US Army
• Non-U.S. Troop Casualties - Total 314, with 177 from the UK
• US Troops Wounded - 30,848, 20% of which are serious brain or spinal injuries (total excludes psychological injuries)
• US Troops with Serious Mental Health Problems - 30% of US troops develop serious mental health problems within 3 to 4 months of returning home
• US Military Helicopters Downed in Iraq - 68 total, at least 36 by enemy fire

IRAQI TROOPS, CIVILIANS & OTHERS IN IRAQ

• Private Contractors in Iraq, Working in Support of US Army Troops - More than 180,000 in August 2007, per The Nation/LA Times.
• Journalists killed - 135, 91 by murder and 44 by acts of war
• Journalists killed by US Forces - 14
• Iraqi Police and Soldiers Killed - 8,792
• Iraqi Civilians Killed, Estimated - A UN issued report dated Sept 20, 2006 stating that Iraqi civilian casualties have been significantly under-reported. Casualties are reported at 50,000 to over 100,000, but may be much higher. Some informed estimates place Iraqi civilian casualities at over 600,000.
• Iraqi Insurgents Killed, Roughly Estimated - 55,000
• Non-Iraqi Contractors and Civilian Workers Killed - 556
• Non-Iraqi Kidnapped - 306, including 57 killed, 147 released, 4 escaped, 6 rescued and 89 status unknown.
• Daily Insurgent Attacks, Feb 2004 - 14
• Daily Insurgent Attacks, July 2005 - 70
• Daily Insurgent Attacks, May 2007 - 163
• Estimated Insurgency Strength, Nov 2003 - 15,000
• Estimated Insurgency Strength, Oct 2006 - 20,000 - 30,000
• Estimated Insurgency Strength, June 2007 - 70,000

QUALITY OF LIFE INDICATORS

• Iraqis Displaced Inside Iraq, by Iraq War, as of May 2007 - 2,255,000
• Iraqi Refugees in Syria & Jordan - 2.1 million to 2.25 million
• Iraqi Unemployment Rate - 27 to 60%, where curfew not in effect
• Consumer Price Inflation in 2006 - 50%
• Iraqi Children Suffering from Chronic Malnutrition - 28% in June 2007 (Per CNN.com, July 30, 2007)
• Percent of professionals who have left Iraq since 2003 - 40%
• Iraqi Physicians Before 2003 Invasion - 34,000
• Iraqi Physicians Who Have Left Iraq Since 2005 Invasion - 12,000
• Iraqi Physicians Murdered Since 2003 Invasion - 2,000
• Average Daily Hours Iraqi Homes Have Electricity - 1 to 2 hours, per Ryan Crocker, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq (Per Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2007)
• Average Daily Hours Iraqi Homes Have Electricity - 10.9 in May 2007
• Average Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Have Electricity - 5.6 in May 2007
• Pre-War Daily Hours Baghdad Homes Have Electricity - 16 to 24
• Number of Iraqi Homes Connected to Sewer Systems - 37%
• Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies - 70% (Per CNN.com, July 30, 2007)
• Water Treatment Plants Rehabilitated - 22%

RESULTS OF POLL Taken in Iraq in August 2005 by the British Ministry of Defense (Source: Brookings Institute)

• Iraqis "strongly opposed to presence of coalition troops - 82%
• Iraqis who believe Coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security - less than 1%
• Iraqis who feel less secure because of the occupation - 67%
• Iraqis who do not have confidence in multi-national forces - 72%

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