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2008 Annual Peace Conference
The True Cost of the 'War on Iraq'

NFP

Download the 2008 Conference Brochure

The economy’s in recession. Voters are nervous about their pocketbooks. So what better time, with an election just around the corner, to have a nationally recognized accounting scholar talking about the social and economic cost of the Iraq War and the White House’s ‘War on Terror’?

Michele Chwastiak, Associate Professor of the Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico, will deliver the keynote address at the 2008 Annual Peace Conference in Lincoln Saturday, October 18 on the topic, “The True and Actual Cost of the War on Iraq — Minus the Accounting Tricks.”

For more than a decade, Chwastiak’s research has specialized on the relationship between managerial accounting and defense spending. In academic articles and papers such as “Rendering Death and Destruction Visible: Counting the Costs of War” and “War, Inc.: Private, Unaccountable and Profitable,” she has examined the role accounting has played in America’s deliberate shift to a permanent war economy.

For examples of this type of military accounting fraud, one thinks immediately of the recurrent $70-80 billion appropriation requests to finance Bush/Cheney Administration’s ‘War on Terror’ that are routinely excluded from the federal budget. Treating these appropriations as ‘offbudget’ effectively disguises the true cost of the war, the size of the deficit and it corollary impact on the economy. Accounting, Chwastiak maintains, has actually become a tool for “abetting rather than deterring unethical behavior in the U.S. defense industry… and masking the social costs of war.”

Inspired no doubt by the Pentagon’s ‘no-bid contracts’ for Dick Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton, and engagement of private mercenaries in Iraq through firms like Blackwater, she is currently researching the impact of privatization on war and accountability, as well as the pandemic fraud it has created.

With Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-researcher Linda Bilmes now calculating the price tag for the Iraq War at $3 trillion, American voters need an accurate evaluation of the total costs of war, beyond those we traditionally account for. Just in time for the November 4 General Election, Professor Chwastiak will provide an honest assessment of the economic, social and political costs of war and its privatization.

This year’s Annual Peace Conference is again being jointly sponsored by the University of Nebraska-Omaha School of Social Work and Nebraskans for Peace. The event will be held at First Lutheran Church, 1551 South 70th Street in Lincoln from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Early registration forms for the Saturday, October 18 conference will be available through the mail by mid–month. Starting September 15, you can also register by contacting the NFP State Office by phone at 402-475-4620 or by email at nfpstate@nebraskansfor peace.org or register directly online at www.nebraskansforpeace.org. Advance registration cost is $25 per person ($10 for students and low-income), which includes lunch. Four-and-one-half CEUs will be available to Social Workers and Licensed Mental Health Practitioners.

2008 marks the beginning of the 40th anniversary celebration of the founding of Nebraskans for Peace. In addition to our usual array of anti-war, nonviolence education, human rights, economic justice and environmental workshops, there will be a special program recognizing the formation of Rural Nebraskans for Peace in 1968 — the forerunner organization that led to the establishment of what is now “the oldest statewide Peace & Justice organization in the United States.”