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"And that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives."

Often people in the U.S. count only the lives of U.S. citizens lost in the violence of the U.S. government. Actually, more than 500,000 have been killed. However, other estimates seem more accurate: 1,455,590 have died violent deaths.

Also, the destruction is far greater than the number of Iraqis killed. Iraq is no longer a stable country.

Great numbers. Not a single source on any of them. If your source is your ass then please state so.

Unemployment rates:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...

Deficit numbers:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/... (First Spreadsheet)

95% of recovery goes to top 1%:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/mon...

Death toll in Afghanistan:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.o...

Who knew my ass was sited all over the Internet!

575 US troops died in Afghanistan during the Bush presidency. By August 18, 2010, following two troop surges initiated by President Obama, that number had doubled. Today, over 1500 US troops have died in Afghanistan since President Obama took office—and yet, little in that war-torn country has changed.

http://www.justforeignpolicy.o...

Your nitpicking over the number is really distasteful and ignorant; people are dying in unbelievable number and all you care about is an accourate count, not stopping it. Very very sick and twisted.

For your information, you can find many sources that quote that number:

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq

but that is not my point. People like you are part of the problem, with your autistic logic, infantile belief systems and brainwashed babble.

Go back to sleep you pabulum gobbling moron.

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/774

By July 24, 2009, the U.S. government was totally clear about the basic facts of what took place in Honduras on June 28, 2009. The U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa sent a cable to Washington with subject: "Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup," asserting that "there is no doubt" that the events of June 28 "constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup." The Embassy listed arguments being made by supporters of the coup to claim its legality, and dismissed them thus: "none ... has any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution." The Honduran military clearly had no legal authority to remove President Zelaya from office or from Honduras, the Embassy said, and their action - the Embassy described it as an "abduction" and "kidnapping" - was clearly unconstitutional. . .

. . .But despite the fact that the U.S. government was crystal clear on what had transpired, the U.S. did not immediately cut off all aid to Honduras except "democracy assistance," as required by U.S. law.

Instead, a month after this cable was sent, the State Department, in its public pronouncements, pretended that the events of June 28 - in particular, "who did what to whom" and the constitutionality of these actions - were murky and needed further study by State Department lawyers, despite the fact that the State Department's top lawyer, Harold Koh, knew exactly "who did what to whom" and that these actions were unconstitutional at least one month earlier. The State Department, to justify its delay in carrying out U.S. law, invented a legal distinction between a "coup" and a "military coup," claiming that the State Department's lawyers had to determine whether a "military coup" took place, because only that determination would meet the legal threshold for the aid cutoff. . .

. . .Why did the State Department drag its feet, pretending that facts which it knew to be clear-cut were murky? Why didn't the State Department speak publicly after July 24 with the same moral clarity as the July 24 cable from the Embassy in Honduras? Had the State Department shared publicly the Embassy's clear assessment of the June 28 events after July 24, history might have turned out differently, because supporters of the coup in the United States - including Republican Members of Congress and media talking heads - continued to dispute basic facts about the coup which the US Embassy in Honduras had reported were not subject to reasonable dispute, and U.S. media reporting on the coup continued to describe these facts as subject to reasonable dispute, long after the Embassy had firmly declared that they were not.

As the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted in an August 2009 report, in the previous 12 months the U.S. had responded to other coups by cutting U.S. aid within days. In these cases - in Africa - there was no lengthy deliberation on whether a "coup" was a "military coup."

What was the difference?

A key difference was that Honduras is in Central America, "our backyard," so different rules applied. Top officials in Washington supported the political aims of the coup. They did not nominally support the means of the coup, as far as we know, but they supported its political end: the removal of the ability of President Zelaya and his supporters to pursue a meaningful reform project in Honduras. On the other hand, they were politically constrained not to support the coup openly, since they knew it to be illegal and unconstitutional. Thus, they pursued a "diplomatic compromise" which would "restore constitutional order" while achieving the coup's central political aim: removal of the ability of President Zelaya and his supporters to pursue a meaningful reform project in Honduras. The effect of their efforts at "diplomatic compromise" was to allow the coup to stand, a result that these supporters

Iraqis killed by the U.S. government: 1,366,350 and counting.

Iraqis killed before and during 2006: 655,000.

Yes, Saddam Hussein was brutal. But the U.S. government has been more brutal.

Millions? Really? Even the most outlying figures for the death tolls have never been in the millions.

JustForeignPolicy.org has a current estimate of 1,320,110 Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion that started in 2003.

This is an extrapolation from the 2006 Lancet study, of course, which estimated about 655,000 deaths until the end of June 2006; whether this kind of extrapolation is sound is another question, but it is not at all unlikely that the figure of 1 million deaths was broken.

And that's just Iraq: Afghanistan, for example, is not counted at all. If you also do that, 1 million total deaths caused by the Bush administration becomes even more likely.

Last time I checked there was also war over large parts of the planet during the Clinton years too.

Ah, yes, "Clinton did it, too". Did you notice you're not actually refuting his argument? Quite the opposite, you're admitting that he is, in fact, correct.

in many of the areas you mention above they [...] will continue to get worse, under Obama.

Can I borrow your crystal ball?

The Iraq Body Count is not just the number of "documented" deaths; it is the number of civilian deaths documented by at least two mainstream media reports. So, yes, the real number is certainly far higher than this. When you extrapolate the trends reported by the IBC combined with the numbers reported by the Lancet study, you get over a million Iraqi civilians killed, which is consistent with the numbers reported by a British study released in September 2007.

The million dead is not a fallacy, it's confirmed by scientific research:

"The number is shocking and sobering.
It is at least 10 times greater than most estimates cited in the US media, yet it is based on a scientific study of violent Iraqi deaths caused by the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003.
That study, published in prestigious medical journal The Lancet, estimated that over 600,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. Iraqis have continued to be killed since then. The graphic above provides a rough daily update of this number based on a rate of increase derived from the Iraq Body Count. (See the complete explanation.)
The estimate that over a million Iraqis have died received independent confirmation from a prestigious British polling agency in September 2007. Opinion Research Business estimated that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed violently since the US-led invasion.
This devastating human toll demands greater recognition. It eclipses the Rwandan genocide and our leaders are directly responsible. Little wonder they do not publicly cite it."

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html

Further the Iraq people don't want us there:

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/pollindex.htm

The unconscionable suffering of the Iraqi people and the quite literal trillion dollars down the drain counting long term healthcare of our soldiers and restocking military hardware most likely to steal their oil makes me angry and no I won't be quiet about it. That trillion dollars could have provided BOTH health care for all Americans AND a real high speed rail system like civilized places in Europe and Asia have. Instead we pissed away a trillion dollars killing a million people in a country where they don't want us there in first place.

Here is a further point SK the American people handed your point a of view a quite through drubbing in the elections, if I were you I'd look for a new set of talking points, American's aren't buying the interventionist line anymore when OUR own country is in such trouble. Goodbye interventionists, and good riddance!

The Iraqi death toll is 1,189,173. The US death toll is around 4,000 (with another 30,000 wounded). That's 297 to 1. Which speaks highly of "all the UAVs, ECM to jam EIDs, superstrong ballistic armour on people and vehicles, digital data and comms that have all contributed to the > $1T cost." I'm no fan of the war, or the cost of the war in humans and dollars, but I would gladly have the increased debt than have the 30k wounded be 30k dead. Better still if they had all stayed home, or in Afghanistan. (US death toll 400)

• 10, 718 - total of deaths from the terrorist attacks bit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_and_other_violent_events_by_death_toll (a run down of some of the better known terrorist attacks in the last century
• 300, 000 to "over 1 million" - estimates of death toll under 25 years of Saddam's rule in Iraq (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm)
• 3815 - American war dead in Iraq
• 1, 080, 923 - estimated Iraqi civilian deaths since 2003 (http://justforeignpolicy.org/