President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.
Now let's see here. There have been 3931 US military deaths in Iraq. That's 4.2 US military deaths per lie.
The lower estimate of Iraqi deaths from Iraq Body Count is 80,625. That's 86.2 Iraqi deaths per lie.
The more realistic estimate of Iraqi deaths from the Lancet study is 655,000. That's 700.5 Iraqi deaths per lie.
The Iraqi occupation has cost the United States about 500 billion dollars so far. That's 534,759,358 dollars per lie.
A more realistic assessment of the cost of the Iraqi occupation is about 1 trillion dollars. That's 1,069,518,716 dollars per lie.
And yet they sleep at night.
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