The Price of Imperial Folly
Lost in the Beltway debate over intelligence failure is the enormous price we – Americans, Iraqis, the world – are paying for the Bush administration's self-serving war.

In sheer dollar amounts, the costs of this precipitate war are already far higher than any number put forward by Bush officials at the outset of the war. The price tag so far is $151 billion and climbing – already three times the initial estimate provided by Bush's Office of Management and Budget and embarrassingly close to the "$100 to $200 billion" that White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay anticipated just before he precipitously left the administration in December 2002. For most of us, $151 billion is an incomprehensible amount of money. It's hard to imagine what that kind of dollar amount actually means. Well, here are some facts to prod our imagination. To begin with, $151 billion can pay for health care for 23 million uninsured Americans; or housing stipends for 27 million homeless people in this country; or a year's salary for 3 million new elementary school teachers; or more than 678,000 new fire engines. The international impact of that kind of money is even more breathtaking. That same $151 billion could feed half the hungry people in the world for two years and provide clean water and sanitation for the entire developing world and fund a comprehensive global AIDS program and pay for childhood immunizations for every child in poor countries that constitute the global South.

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Don't Forget the Bodies
On losing count of the dead.

Writing in The Washington Post, columnist Jim Hoagland notes that "the American public and media seem to be slowly trying to tune out Iraq's continuing violence. Accounts of all but spectacular assaults slide deeper into network news broadcasts and the inside pages of newspapers as the summer and the U.S. presidential campaign progress." That's certainly true on the small scale of The Revealer. We used to compile daily -- or, at least, weekly -- round-ups of religion in the news from Iraq. But it's been awhile since we broached the subject. And now our featurewell is, indeed, filled with news of and reflections on the presidential campaign. After all, there are only so many times you can point out that the conflict in Iraq is a holy war. You'd be a bore if you kept noting that many Americans view the fight as one between Christianity and Islam. And that while the secular press most often explicitly ignores the role of religion on both sides, the stories it tells implicitly reinforce that notion. After awhile, every picture of a dead body starts to look alike. The bodies that return, and the bodies that stay where they are; the coffins shrinkwrapped red, white, and blue, the corpses laid out on blankets or heaped in the back of pick-up trucks.

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  thanks to daily KOS

You can always check in with Juan Cole for the latest body count.

15 Killed, including a US Soldier; Dozens Wounded
Minister of Justice Narrowly Escapes

Guerrillas attempted but failed to assassinate the Iraqi Minister of Justice, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, 83, with a suicide bomb on Saturday. The powerful explosion did kill 3 of his bodyguards and two civilians, including his nephew, and wounded 8 others. Credit for the attack was claimed by al-Tawhid, the organization of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which castigated al-Hassan as an "apostate," i.e. a former Muslim who had renounced Islam. Radical Islamists consider Muslims who cooperate with the West to be apostates, and in medieval Islamic jurisprudence, apostasy was a capital crime.

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