Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now!

U.S. To Hand Over Iraq Bases, Equipment Worth Billions

Rather than strip those bases clean and ship everything home, Defense Department officials tell The Huffington Post that over 2.4 million pieces of equipment worth a total of at least $250 million -- everything from tanks and trucks to office furniture and latrines -- have been given away to the Iraqi government in the past year, with the pace of transfers expected to increase dramatically in the coming months.

THE U.S. BASES

The most colossal relics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq will be the outsize military bases the Bush administration began erecting not long after the invasion, under the never explicitly stated assumption that Iraq would become the long-term staging area for U.S. forces in the region.
As a recent Congressional Research Service report noted, the Department of Defense "built up a far more extensive infrastructure than anticipated to support troops and equipment in and around Iraq and Afghanistan."
The biggest push came in 2005, with over $1.2 billion in base-building contracts signed in that fiscal year alone, according to CRS.
"How did we come to be wasting that much money?" asked Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the progressive National Security Network. The answer, she said, is that dissenting voices weren't heeded when Bush administration officials were pushing their hugely overambitious agenda.
"The problem that is often cited in the run-up to the war continued afterward," she said. "The political and media elite weren't paying attention

On March 17 2003 the U.S. invaded Iraq  under the completely false pretense that its then ruler Saddam Hussein  had stock piled weapons of mass destruction.  With the Bush administration providing the appropriate propaganda (The leaders of the former Soviet Union would have been so proud) they convinced not only the American people but the world that without the use of force we might witness the next Hiroshima.  So. after 8 years of war and an unknown number of dead Iraqi civilians and no weapons of mass destruction the American military will just simply leave.