Wars to go on until US economy busts

Senior fellow of the Nation Institute, Chris Hedges

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/161041.html


The economy-damaging US wars are thought to continue as long as giant American corporations supporting Washington politicians profit from them.

The US economy “will fail because we're paying for it through debt, through borrowing,” a senior fellow at the Nation Institute, Chris Hedges, said in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday.

"The continuation of these conflicts is good for their bottom-line. That's why we're seeing very little reticence on the part of the government which knows how drastic the situation is in Afghanistan to pull back because the people who hold the ultimate power in the United States, which are corporations, want these wars to continue," Hedges continued.

“There are huge corporations whose profits have swollen four by four," Hedges went on to say, also referring to the unwinnable situation of the Afghan war, as covered by popular US news sources such as the New York Times.

In regards to the Iraq war, he mentioned US President Barack Obama's tactical but unpromising words that “he would withdraw the combat troops from Iraq,” only when was there acknowledgement of occupation troops' stay in the war-torn country for years to come.

According to official statistics, 48,000 American troops are currently based in war-wrecked Iraq as a result of which about 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced.

The United States' invasion of Iraq took place in 2003, without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council, under the pretext that Iraq owns weapons of mass destruction. Later George W. Bush, the then US president, admitted that no such weapons were found there and said he was 'sorry' for those who died in the war.

It is estimated that over 1,300,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed during the war in Iraq. Though combat operations have officially ended, about 50,000 US troops will remain in the war-ravaged country until the end of 2011 to "advise Iraqi forces and protect US interests."

There are currently about 97,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Statistics reveal that there have been over 34,000 Afghan civilian deaths and 1,445 US fatalities since the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2003.

President Obama had previously promised that US forces would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011. At the Lisbon Summit though, an agreement was merely reached to start the withdrawal in 2014.