up the total number of casualties it suffered during its eight-year war in Iraq.
Brig. Gen. Masud Jazayeri, the director of culture and propaganda for the armed forces, said, “The Americans always try to keep the statistics on their casualties a secret and hide them from world public opinion.”
He said the Americans re- port only 50,000 killed and wounded US forces in Iraq, “but the real statistics must be a lot more.”
Actually, the total number of casualties reported by the Pentagon is 36,448, comprised of 4,483 combat and non-combat deaths and 31,965 wounded from the March 2003 invasion through last week.
The death statistics aren’t questioned since the names of the dead are released and families would know if their relatives’ names were being withheld. Jazayeri said, “The financial cost of the US armed forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan, too, are skyrocketing high, and the US public is kept unaware of the real statistics in this regard, as well.”
He said, “Many US tax payers do not know that at least $1 trillion has been paid from their pockets, although, according to some sources, the real expenses of the US forces’ presence in Iraq has been over $ 3 trillion, and in a more precise calculation it would be revealed that the real figure is even higher than that.”
The standard figure that appears in American newspapers is that the war has cost “almost $1 trillion.” That is not a Pentagon number. It is a tabulation done by the Congressional Budget Office and has not been questioned except by Jazayeri.
Jazayeri said, “Today with over $15 trillion of debt, the US government has the greatest debt of any government in the world, and is therefore a bankrupt government on the verge of collapse. But of course the psychological propaganda of the US Administration and the super-capitalism camp’s media levers prevent the possibility of revealing such realities for the US public. But sooner or later, the truth will be unveiled and the nations of the world will be taken aback by the sudden downfall of the US empire.”
Actually the measure of the weight of debt is debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). Jazayeri didn’t mention that 13 countries have a greater debt burden than the United States, according to the International Monetary Fund. The US debt burden is 94 percent of GDP; Japan’s debt burden is 220 percent of GDP. Iran has a very, very low debt burden of only 11.6 percent of GDP, ac- cording the IMF.
Jazayeri said, “Although the US administration denies the statistics on its material expenses and loss of life in the course of its illegitimate presence in Iraq, the psychological damage suffered by the US military forces there cannot be hidden.”
He said, “The statistics on the female and male US forces who have been sexually harassed by their own colleagues is very high, which is by itself proof of the low morale among the US troops.”