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Atlantic Free Press was launched in September 2006 by Dutch-Canadian R.G. Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands and American Expatriate Chris Floyd of Oxford, UK.

Brick Ogden, an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.

Assistant Editor Canadian Chris Cook hails from Victoria, British Columbia and Senior Writer Paul William Roberts is based in Toronto - but often on the road.

The mission of AF Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried public discourse today. AF Press provides a new venue for disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.

Book Reviews from Atlantic Free Press Writers

The Three Trillion Dollar War – The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict - Book Review by Jim Miles

Written by Jim Miles
Monday, 14 April 2008
by Jim Miles Following on their previous pronouncement that war costs could amount to as much as 1 trillion to 2 trillion dollars, ten times more than even then previously thought [1], Stiglitz and Bilmes have furthered their research into the cost of the war with their new title The Three Trillion Dollar War. But it isn’t – three trillion dollars that is. More than likely it will be much higher, as this “realistic-moderate” appraisal is continually described as conservative, with comments about always using the conservative numbers and even discounting certain costs as they could not be properly quantified. The “full tally” indicates “the numbers that we believe (conservatively) best captures the costs of the Iraq venture, even without counting interest – the total for Iraq alone is more then $4 trillion; including Afghanistan, it increases to $5 trillion.” The book itself is generally a dry, well-written explanation of the kinds of costs incurred (death benefits, supplies and materials depletion, medical care into the future, future lost wages, interest on the debt, diseases, oil, rebuilding the economies…) and the methodologies used to establish the realistic value of the costs. There does not appear to be much room for anyone but a trained economist to argue with the figures, numbers so large that they are probably meaningless for most ordinary people to really comprehend. Because the costs are being financed not through taxes on the citizens but through debt (money borrowed, mainly from overseas creditors) and because there is no readily visible military draft, the financial pain of this war is concealed from the American public, as are the physical and emotional pains of the returning personnel. Article Continues/Read More... Add Comment (0)

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