In case anyone really wants the facts this is from the Fund For World Peace a Carnegie Mellon funded group using British Standards for prosperity, stability, infrastructure, etc. ect.,



This is 2008 and as you can see Iraq is no 5 on the list of failed states and amazingly Afghanistan is ahead of it at no 7.

Only Somalia which has no government at all, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Chad are worse off than Iraq!

Add the D.R. Congo and then you have Afghanistan.

So for all those people who claim the people of these nations are better off after hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and trillions of dollars of damage to their infrastructures I would love to know where you are imagining that they are better off because according to every known index standard they aren’t.

Amazingly pre-earthquake Haiti the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere was at no. 14, or roughly twice as desirable as Afghanistan or nearly three times more desirable than Iraq!

Currently Iran is ranked as 49 on the list and dollars to donuts says it would plummet like a rock with an American invasion.

People really need to stop lying to them selves about these wars (and daisy cutters too) they kill and maim and destroy and these nations are far worse off than when we invaded them.

Yes governments are gone that we didn’t like but the puppet governments we have installed beholden to Washington Lawmakers and funding and U.S. and other Coalition Nation’s corporations don’t even function close to on par with the regimes we ‘saved’ these people from.

When you consider the American loss of life and dollars in prosecuting these wars, well, in my humble opinion we are either a nation of totally misinformed and supremely ignorant citizens or we are just cold and heartless.

While most of us look for comfortable lies to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for the destruction of these nations and the abysmal circumstances the citizens of them now have to live in, the people there do in fact have to live in them and with what we have done.

Too bad they don’t get the luxury to lie to themselves about it!

the funny thing about America is that we have enough atomic bombs to obliterate the world, but the moment someone else even wants to make nuclear energy, we get our panties in a bunch and throw a ten billion dollar hissy fit. I love America, I love the people, but I hate our corrupt self-serving war mongering government. we would all be a lot better off if we stopped using all of this money for pointless wars trying to bring democracy to a country full of people who are still trading goats. do you think they even know what democracy is? doubtful. what we need to do is fix our ailing economy, fix our failing school systems, and try to help the hungry and the homeless, not overseas in some impoverished african country, but right here in america where these problems also exist but are overlooked by the media and the people. this may sound cold, but do you see the world rushing to our aid when we have a natural disaster? it's time that we look out for our own interests, america used to be the best country in the world, and it still is, but it is slipping into nothing more than a welfare state with failing social programs and a government who seems to think they can throw money at our problems and they will soon resolve themselves. I truly hope people will soon begin to wake up to the realities of the world around them and shake this dream land they live in loose once and for all.

i may have gotten a little off topic but thats just logically where talk of more war in the middle east leads me

[edit on 2/25/2010 by murphyhurtme]

Thanks for posting this.

I read a book about War Gaming recently and my guess is that Russia and China were not involved in the game as this would have made it "too complicated" i.e. too many outcomes.

The military take these war games extremely seriously and they can be insightful - In the 80s and 90s, there was questions about how useful it would be for weapons shield that knocked out say 3 in 10 nuclear missiles. When this was gamed, they found that Russia would not know which of the 3 of 10 missiles would be knocked out, so they would have to fire a second volley of missiles. Much to everyones surprise, even knocking just 1 of 10 russian missiles meant that Russia would run pout of nuclear missiles!

So as this is a military source, then I can believe these results and understand that they have been played as close to reality as possible.