Last week, the US House of Representatives voted to spend another $45 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would bring the total spent to over $300 billion, in one of America's costliest military operations. This brings the deficit to a record $780 billion, threatening to bankrupt an economy that, until five years ago, was relatively stable with low unemployment and a government surplus. Under the Bush Administration, overall spending has increased by 33 percent over the past four years, and according to the Cato Institute, is expected to rise by another 3.6 percent in 2006.

     In a nation that cannot afford to provide health care for its citizens, has eliminated critical social services programs, cut environmental protections such as the clean air act (proven to lower the incidence of childhood asthma), and eliminated benefit packages to veterans, the US is spending a huge amount of its annual budget on war and occupation. That amount will certainly increase the longer the US "stays the course" as Afghanistan's resistance is now growing alongside Iraq's.

     What will this latest $45 billion fund in Iraq? If the past two years are any indication, it won't be reconstruction of the country's infrastructure, devastated by the US-led "Shock and Awe" campaign, which leveled all but the Ministry of Oil. Nor will it be to rebuild a medical system destroyed by twelve years of sanctions, but that, despite post-invasion promises, a recent review of Iraq's hospitals found they are worse off now. Nor will it be to alleviate the crippling unemployment rate that has been estimated at 50 percent post-occupation, but that former UN Oil-for-Food Program director Hans Van Sponek, during testimony on the state of Iraq's economy at the recent World Tribunal on Iraq, turned to me and said it was, tragically, at least 70 percent. Both unemployment and the escalating violence are exacerbated by the fact that Iraqis are not hired for any of the reconstruction of their own country. Instead, either Western contractors or third-country nationals, such as the Nepalese hired on as security guards, are brought in.

     What the $45 billion will fund is "security," which increasingly looks like a combination of Viet Nam-style tactics, where a community is destroyed in order to save it, and Israeli-style military tactics in occupied Palestinian where collective punishment is the norm.

     In Iraq now, cities are bombed, surrounded and sealed, house-to-house searches conducted, medical care denied, snipers installed, and finally, if Fallujah is any example, IDs issued to residents, without which entry is denied. If, as was stated during November's attack, this is done in order to save the city, from whom it is being saved is not entirely clear.

     While certain cities such as Mosul, Baquba and Samarra have experienced these types of maneuvers to some degree, western Iraq is the current target of these collective punishment tactics.

     The US, citing concerns about foreign fighters entering through Syria (after two years), has been calling communities in Al Anbar province "cities of resistance" and giving them the Fallujah treatment since May.

    Doctors for Iraq Society issued an urgent plea this last week for US forces to withdraw amid the unfolding humanitarian crisis. Eyewitnesses recounted how US soldiers attacked hospitals in Al Qa'im and Haditha both, targeting medical personnel and ambulances, and preventing the wounded from receiving medical attention. One of these eyewitnesses, Eman Khammas, showed pictures of those targeted when she testified at the World Tribunal on Iraq. Snipers and house raids are blamed on the deaths of hundreds, including the cousin of Iraq's UN ambassador who accused the marines of killing his unarmed relative in cold blood during a house raid in Haditha on June 25th.

     The United Nations news agency IRIN estimates 7,000 families have been made homeless by recent military operations in Al Qa'im and Haditha and are now stuck in the nearby desert where temperatures regularly reach 110 degrees. Potable water is scarce, as is food, shelter and medical care. The Iraqi Red Crescent was allowed to bring in five caravans of medical aid yesterday to some 6,000 families displaced from nearby Karabila.

     In addition, increased security measures in Iraq are translating to an increase in journalists' deaths. This past week alone, three journalists were killed, one of whom, Knight Ridder correspondent Yasser Salihee, was shot by a single bullet to the head by snipers the day after he had reported on US-backed death-squad activity. The International Federation of Journalists has called upon the US to investigate the deaths, all of which were at the hands of US forces. Iraq has been the deadliest war for journalists. Reporters Without Borders lists 61 journalists and media assistants killed March 2003; including those killed last week brings the total to 64.

      US troop deaths also continue to rise, but of course those who suffer the highest casualties are Iraqis themselves.

     Iraqis, who Americans supposedly were sent to "liberate," have somehow now become the enemy. Once seen as the victim of Saddam Hussein's regime, they are now the victims of a US-led occupation that has left their country in shambles, their health system bankrupted, their economy 'globalized' under Coalition Provisional Authority rules, their cultural heritage destroyed, over 100,000 civilians dead, and countless tens of thousands homeless.

     This is what the additional $45 billion of US taxpayer's money will continue to fund, until the American public insists on immediate and full withdrawal of its troops, as called upon by a growing coalition that includes veterans and their families, Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Military Families Speak Out, groups that perhaps know best the cost of such a war.

     This Independence Day can best be commemorated by truly giving Iraqis their own. Then begins the long but necessary task of reparations, the only path toward true security, not only to Iraq, but to our nation and the rest of the world as well.

     As I'm reminded while drinking chay, tea, with a Turkish friend, "Everything changed for us after September 11. What America does affects everyone. We have a saying here, 'When America gets a cold, we get the flu.'"