4,000

Here is a new song for those 4000 US Troops and the 89,000 Iraqi civilians who have died as a result of George Bush's war.

Five American Soldiers Killed in Baghdad

BAGHDAD — Five American soldiers were killed and three wounded Monday when a suicide bomber walked up to their patrol on a crowded shopping street in central Baghdad and blew himself up, the military and Iraqi police said.

The blast was one of the worst single attacks on the American military since the so-called surge campaign of additional American troops to pacify the Iraqi capital and surrounding areas was begun last year.

The soldiers were on a regular daily patrol in the middle of the afternoon on a busy street of clothing, food and souvenir stores in Mansour, a relatively upscale and predominantly Sunni Arab district, when the suicide attacker, described as a young male, approached the soldiers and engaged them in conversation.

“He came up and stood beside them and started talking to them and detonated himself,” said an Iraqi police officer at the scene.

An Iraqi interpreter was wounded by the blast, which occurred about 3 p.m., said Lt. Michael Street of the Navy, a military spokesman in Baghdad.

Four of the soldiers were killed immediately by the explosion and the fifth died later from his injuries. “Initial reports indicate the explosive device was a suicide vest,” the military statement said. Iraqi police officers said the soldiers had undertaken regular patrols and were well known in the neighborhood.

While there have been other big attacks on the Americans in Iraq this year, they have been relatively rare in Baghdad as the city has become safer and more secure.

In January, militants killed nine American soldiers over two successive days in the volatile Sunni Arab heartlands north of Baghdad. Six of the soldiers died when they were clearing a house in Diyala during an offensive and insurgents detonated a large bomb hidden in the house.

Despite the overall drop in violence in Iraq, deadly assaults on American troops have continued, particularly in the northern Arab provinces, where Sunni Arab guerrillas have many strongholds.

In Diyala Province on Feb. 17, two American soldiers were shot to death, and another was wounded, according to the American military.

Five American soldiers were killed on Feb. 8 in two roadside bombings, one in Baghdad and the other in northern Iraq, the military said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/world/middleeast/11iraq.html?hp

Studies: Iraq Costs US $12B Per Month

Although American military and Iraqi civilian casualties have declined in recent months, the rate of spending has shot up. A fully funded 2008 war budget will be 155 percent higher than 2004's, the CBO reports.

The reasons are numerous: the "surge" of additional U.S. units into Iraq; rising fuel costs; fattened bonuses to attract re-enlistments; and particularly the need to "reset," that is, repair or replace worn-out, destroyed or damaged military equipment. Almost $17 billion is appropriated this year for advanced armored vehicles to protect troops against roadside bombs.

The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the "burn" rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with "best-case" and "realistic-moderate" scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion _ or more _ by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.

Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted. But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say.

In a Jan. 30 report to Congress, the GAO observed that the U.S. will be committing "significant" future resources to the wars, "requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge."

These numbers don't include the war's cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion _ with its devastating air bombardments _ and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.

No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/10/studies-iraq-costs-us-1_n_90694.html