Earth, The Blue Marble, courtesy NASA
COP 21 is, perhaps, the most important international effort in history. It concluded with an agreement by 196 nations to limit CO2 emissions to hold global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Centigrade or 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit (NPR).
The only way to do this is to phase out fossil fuels, quickly, and replace them with efficient use of sustainable energy systems, i.e., solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and insulation.
Excerpted from “Iraq ‘rebuilders’ Died by Hundreds,” by Robert Burns, AP National Security Writer, via Boston.com (the online presence of The Boston Globe).
In the first tally of its kind, a federal investigative agency has calculated that at least 719 people, nearly half of them Americans, were killed working on projects to rebuild Iraq following the U.S. invasion in 2003.
The toll represents an aspect of the Iraq war that is rarely brought to public attention, overshadowed by the much higher number killed in combat as well as the billions of taxpayer dollars squandered on reconstruction.
There is no confirmed total number of Iraq war deaths. The U.S. military lost 4,488 in Iraq, and its allies a little over 300. The number of Iraq deaths has not been established but is thought to exceed 100,000.
Navy Cmdr. Duane G. Wolfe was among the 719. He was not fighting the insurgency, but it was fighting him.
He was among the army of lawyers, engineers, contractors and others who paid a heavy price trying to put a broken Iraq and its shattered economy back together. Their deaths were recorded among the war’s combat fatalities, but until now no one has carved out the “rebuilder” deaths as a subset of the overall casualty list.
Wolfe was killed on May 25, 2009, in a roadside bombing while returning to Baghdad after inspecting a waste water treatment plant under construction near Fallujah in Iraq’s western province of Anbar. The $100 million project endured long delays and large cost overruns, and a U.S. federal audit last fall concluded that it probably was not worth the cost. The audit said “many” people died getting it built, but it did not say how many.
via US report says Iraq ‘rebuilders’ died by hundreds – Boston.com.
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Steven Anderson, Brigadier General, Retired, has estimated the costs of air-conditioning U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan to $20.2 Billion. Anderson served as chief logistics officer for General David Petraeus in Iraq.
The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion, according to a former Pentagon official.That’s more than NASA’s budget. It’s more than BP has paid so far for damage from the Gulf oil spill. It’s what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.”When you consider the cost to deliver the fuel to some of the most isolated places in the world — escorting, command and control, medevac support — when you throw all that infrastructure in, we’re talking over $20 billion,” Steven Anderson tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin. He’s a retired brigadier general who served as chief logistician for Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. He’s now in the private sector, selling technologies branded as energy-efficient to the Defense Department.
Excerpted from”Among The Costs Of War: Billions A Year In A.C.?”, broadcast June 25th on the weekend edition of All Things Considered:
This is a more complicated because it includes the logistics costs of building roads in order to deliver equipment and fuel. Building and rebuilding road infrastructure, of course, have lasting value apart their use for delivering fuel to U.S. outposts.
Anderson further estimates that 1,000 U.S. troops – excluding private contractors – have been killed guarding fuel convoys.
This is illustrative of the scale of our logistical lines and expenses – and the centrality of energy in military logistics.
Having invested this much in capital and overhead (fuel), and with the future of our engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan uncertain, what can be done. From Among The Costs Of War: Billions A Year In A.C.?”
The 33,000 troops who will return home by the end of next year match the numbers sent to Afghanistan in 2010, at a cost of about $30 billion. That comes out to about $1 million a soldier. But the savings of withdrawing those troops won’t equal out, experts say.
“What history has told us is that you don’t see a proportional decrease in spending based on the number of troops when you draw them down,” says Chris Hellman, a senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project.
“In Afghanistan that’s going to be particularly true because it’s a very difficult and austere environment in which to operate,” he says.
That means most war expenditures lie not in the troops themselves but in the infrastructure that supports them — infrastructure that in some cases will remain in place long after troops are gone.
“We’re building big bases,” American University professor Gordon Adams says, describing the money invested as, in economic terms, “sunk” costs.
“We’re seeing this in Iraq. We’re turning over to the Iraqis — mostly either for a small penny or for free — the infrastructure that we built in Iraq. But we won’t see back any money from that infrastructure.”
General Anderson has proposed what is usually the most efficient initial strategy: “negawatts, which is to say, conserving energy and reconfiguring the U.S. tents to resist heat and thereby use less power in keeping the tents comfortable. Below are images of tents modified with polyurethane to increase their ability to resist heat:
Courtesy Steven Anderson and NPR/All Things Considered (weekend edition).
Courtesy Brig. General Steven Anderson (United States Army, retired) and NPR's All Things Considered (weekend editio).
Via BBC News:
The BBC has conducted an investigation which demonstrated that Iraq purchased bomb detection devices in which the component purported to detect trace amounts of TNT was, in fact, “nothing but the type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores.” Iraqi Interior ministry still backing ‘bomb detector’
According to the BBC,
Some Iraqi officials are insisting that a controversial bomb detection device works, despite a BBC inquiry in which experts said the item was useless.
Britain has banned exports of the ADE-651 and the director of the company selling them was arrested and bailed.(emphasis supplied)
But the device is still being used at checkpoints all over Baghdad. Continue reading
To paraphrase John Kennedy, “Ich bin ein Keynesian.”
Jude Wanniski coined the term “Supply Side Economics” in 1976 as a reaction to Keynesian and monetarist thought. In his book, The Way The World Works, Wanniski argues against taxes. “Working together three men can build three houses in three months. Working separately, they can build three houses in six months…. If the tax rate on home building is 49% they will work together … if the tax goes to 51% they will suffer a net loss because of their teamwork and so will work separately in the barter economy and pay no taxes. … the government loses all the revenue and the economy loses the production…”
Here are Wanniski’s assumptions:
These assumptions are flawed. Continue reading
KBR, through negligence, kills Americans in Iraq. Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, of Pittsburgh, serving in Iraq was killed while taking a shower in his barracks in Baghdad . (Military.com.)
An Army investigation called the electrocution death of a U.S. Soldier in Iraq a “negligent homicide” caused by military contractor KBR Inc. and two of its supervisors
Sgt. Maseth was one of several soldiers killed by electrocution in the shower.
KBR, the firm once owned by Haliburton, the oil services firm once run by Dick Cheney, built the barracks, installed the shower, and apparently connected the electrical wiring to the plumbing, in violation of building codes and common sense and without oversight.
Q: Why is an oil services firm supporting a military operation?
A: Because, according to Alan Greenspan, it’s a war for oil (click here).
Q: Will KBR be held accountable?
A: I certainly hope so.
Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
James Risen reports in the Times of July 18th (Electrical Risks at Iraq Bases Are Worse Than Said) that
Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.
During just one six-month period — August 2006 through January 2007 — at least 283 electrical fires destroyed or damaged American military facilities in Iraq, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, documents obtained by The New York Times show. Two soldiers died in an electrical fire at their base near Tikrit in 2006, the records note, while another was injured while jumping from a burning guard tower in May 2007. Electrical problems were the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq, according to an Army survey issued in February 2007. It noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.”
Michael Yon Online: he’s a U.S. veteran who’s been blogging about the war from Iraq, apparently pleasing and irritating people on both
ideological sides of things. If there’s a discernible ideology here, it’s the U.S. Special Forces notion that you win over cultures and communitites with a lot of engagement, community-building, and (physical) infrastructure construction.
I wouldn’t have learned about Michael Yon’s work if I hadn’t found a piece about it on BlogRunne
r, a site started by The New York Times, and which had a link to this profile of Michael Yon by Richard Perez-Pena.
In mid-2003, the World Health organization reported on cholera in Iraq:
rom 28 April to 4 June 2003, a total of 73 laboratory-confirmed cholera cases have been reported in Iraq : 68 in Basra governorate, 4 in Missan governorate, 1 in Muthana governorate. No deaths have been reported.
From 17 May to 4 June 2003, the daily surveillance system of diarrhoeal disease cases in the four main hospitals of Basra reported a total of 1549 cases of acute watery diarrhea. Among these cases, 25.6 % occurred in patients aged 5 years and above.
Noah Schactman on the cycles of innovation and counter-innovation between insurgent-placed IEDs and coalition forces, in Danger Room:
Radio-controlled bombs used to be the biggest killer of American troops in Iraq. Now, they’ve been rendered all-but-useless. Good news, right? Like so much else in Iraq, it’s not quite that simple.
Since the Iraq insurgency began, mobile phones, garage-door openers, and remotely-driven kids’ toys have all been used to trigger improvised explosive devices from afar. In response, the U.S. military has cobbled together an arsenal of radio-frequency jammers, to interrupt the deadly signals before they can set off the bombs. At first, the jammers had all kinds of troubles. Each type of jammer would only cover a relatively small slice of the spectrum. And they’d drive friendly radio and robots haywire.
But those problems have largely been fixed, troops across Iraq report. The newer jammers have effectively killed off radio-controlled IEDs in major chunks of the country.
The explosive cat-and-mouse game continues, though. The American have built up high-tech bomb-stoppers. So the insurgents have gone ever lower-tech than before. They’ve largely turned towards so-called “command wire” IEDs to attack U.S. targets.
Pairs of insulated copper threads, some not much thicker than a hair, are buried under the Iraqi dust, and strung out for as long as a kilometer. At the end, an insurgent triggerman waits – sometimes in a buried bunker. It’s a more crude approach to killing, of course. But, barring a lucky find of wires, “there’s no way for us to defeat it,” says one bomb technician. And those wires are getting attached to bigger and bigger bombs.
[picture above, of a cement-mixer-turned-shaped-charge. From Danger Room]
– snip –
Do away with one problem, and you now have to cope with the blowback from your success.
– snip –Anyway, command-wire bombs aren’t the only IED threat over here. “Pressure plate” weapons, triggered by the smallest stress, are also in vogue here. Some are even shoved into brown ration packets, and left by the side of the road. Insurgents continue to use passive infrared sensors — like those used in burglar alarms – to sense changes in heat, and trigger a bomb accordingly. Many Humvees here are equipped with a flash-type device that can prematurely set the trigger off. But there will surely be a counter to our countermeasure.
Schachtman is on the money. The relative positions of the two forces don’t appear to make it likely that either side will have a distinct advantage with any longevity.
There is one way to deal with a problem of this sort: it’s to make a majority of the local population identify with soldiers, make them believe that the soldiers are acting out of a desire to protect them. That delicate opportunity slipped out of our hand in 2003, and it’s been moving away from us since.
Alan Greenspan says ‘We invaded Iraq for Oil!’
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
I’m also shocked that most of the coverage is out of the US.
But, now that the cat is out of the bag, let’s do the math. Iraq, according to the Global Policy Forum, and the CIA, Iraq has 112.5 Billion Barrels of “proven reserves” of oil. At $80 per barrel … Iraq’s oil is worth $9.0 Trillion. We’re only spending $1 trillion, so it’s a pretty good return on investment. 900 percent return on investment for the 112.5 billion barrels of proven reserves.
And they said George W couldn’t do math.
If the “probable” reserves – in addition to the proven reserves – are only another 100 billion barrels – that’s 212.5 billion barrels of oil. Black Gold. Texas Tea. That ups the ante to 1,700% ROI. Why that’s better than Microsoft’s historic $3 thousand in 1986 worth $One Million in 1999. And Iraq’s “probable reserves” are estimated to be another 200 billion barrels. Of course this is assuming we win the war, and get to keep the oil.
– a blog written by one very articulate soldier in Iraq. Now on our blogroll.