THE GLOBAL BEAT-RESOURCES FOR THE GLOBAL JOURNALIST

Long-term damage: An Iraq war amputee

Cost of Iraq Could Top $2 Trillion
Properly calculating the cost to the U.S. of the Iraq war requires tabulating not only the weekly budget expenditure on maintaining the U.S. force in Iraq, but also the long-term costs such as those of providing health care to wounded Americans, rebuilding an over-stretched military and other unforeseen expenditures. Using this broader approach, economist Joseph Stiglitz has calculated that the total long-term cost of the Iraq war to the U.S. could top $2 trillion. Stiglitz presented his findings on a panel hosted by Economists for Peace and Security at the American Economic Association/Allied Social Sciences Association annual conference in Boston. "Predicting overall costs when no one knows how long the war will last, or how many US troops will remain deployed and for how long, is an imprecise exercise," writes the Boston Globe on Stiglitz's findings. "But the range of some future expenses can be assessed, such as the likely medical bills and disability payments for the soldiers who have been wounded in the conflict. Twenty percent of them, for example, have serious brain or spinal injuries that will require life-long care. The cost of death benefits to military families and bonuses being paid to soldiers to reenlist and to sign up new recruits can also be tallied. So can secondary costs such as the interest on the rising budget deficit as a result of war spending." On the basis of those and other expenses, Stiglitz suggests $2 trillion may be a conservative estimate. (Boston Globe, January 8, 2006)

Improvised Explosive Device, as described by Globalsecurity.org

Dealing with Iraq's IEDs
The insurgent weapon that has claimed the most American lives in Iraq is also one of the simplest: The Improvised Explosive Device or IED. Recognizing that these homemade charges assembled from a variety of easily accessible munitions poses a grave threat to U.S. forces not only in the current war in Iraq, but as insurgents share knowledge across borders it will likely become the norm in anti-American insurgencies elsewhere, the U.S. military has called for the equivalent of a Manhattan Project to counter the danger. But, says Center for Defense Information researcher Hannah Levine, that may be the wrong approach. The IED threat is always evolving as insurgents adapt their technology to U.S. responses, she notes. The only effective counter must be similarly adaptive. The analogy, she suggests, is combatting a mutating flu virus. If vaccine programs are based on an earlier version of the virus, they are ineffective. (Center for Defense Information, January 4, 2006)

East Timor: A peacemaking success story

Peace Breaking Out All Over?
You'd never know it to read the headlines, argues David Mack, but "the reality is that, since the end of the Cold War, armed conflict and nearly all other forms of political violence have decreased. The world is far more peaceful than it was. Why has this change attracted so little attention? In part because the global media give far more coverage to wars that start than to those that quietly end, but also because no international agency collects global or regional data on any form of political violence." So Mack, of the University of British Columbia, and a group of international colleagues spent five years collating the Oxford University-backed Human Security Report. Its conclusions show conflict in decline since the end of the Cold War, and a level of success for diplomatic efforts to avoid war quite remarkable in light of popular perceptions. (Washington Post via Winston Salem Journal, January 2, 2006)

Artist's rendering of a hypothetical 'bullet hitting a bullet' scenario

It Doesn't Work, But That's No Reason Not to Deploy It: Missile Defense Update
The Pentagon's multibillion dollar missile defense program is in full swing, with the tenth interceptor missile having been deployed in California last month. Soon, the U.S. will begin seeking a European host for parts of the system, currently confined to California and Alaska. One small problem, writes Victoria Sampson, is that so far, the system has failed to prove itself viable. "The interceptors fielded in Alaska and California are part of a weapons system that suffered two flight test failures within three months. In December 2004 and February 2005, the interceptor rockets not only failed to intercept their test targets -- they could not even leave the launch pad. The United States has been launching rockets for decades now; while missile defense requires an accuracy that has been likened to 'hitting a bullet with a bullet,' rocket launches should be well within our capabilities.

"Following these recent setbacks, MDA officials took a hard look at their testing program and scaled things down. On Dec. 13, 2005, a test of the interceptor rocket was held, and finally it managed to get off the ground. No target was used; nor will a live target be incorporated in the tests for some time.

"Yet somehow, the Pentagon argues with a straight face that this system can provide a 'limited' defense for the United States against missile attack. It is theoretically possible that it may do so in the future, but missile defense, as it stands today, tomorrow, and really, for the next few years, does nothing more than divert funding and resources from programs that actually do work. Still, it continues to grow." (Center for Defense Information, January 4, 2006)