Linda J. Bilmes is a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and co-author (with Joseph Stiglitz) of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. At the Boston Globe, she writes—The $5 Trillion Wars:
This October marks 15 years since American troops entered Afghanistan. It was a precursor to the occupation of Iraq and is the longest military conflict in US history. Yet the trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended in these wars have rated barely a mention in the presidential campaign.
The most recent estimates suggest that war costs will run to nearly $5 trillion — a staggering sum that exceeds even the $3 trillion that Joseph Stiglitz and I predicted back in 2008.
Yet the cost seems invisible to politicians and the public alike. The reason is that almost all of the spending has been financed through borrowing — selling US Treasury Bonds around the world — leaving our children to pick up the tab. Consequently, the wars have had little impact on our pocketbooks. [...]
All of this accounts for the absence of any real political discussion about how we will fund huge costs of the war that are still to be paid — for example, the $1 trillion in lifetime disability compensation that we have awarded to 960,000 recent veterans. Worse, no one is asking whether the current approach in Afghanistan is working. Last month the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko, reported that corruption in Afghanistan is far more widespread than before the 2001 US invasion, due to US policies that “unintentionally aided and abetted corruption.” But his investigations get barely a mention in the media.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—Bush nixes Muslim peacekeepers for Iraq:
Lovely.
President George W. Bush rebuffed a plan last month for a Muslim peacekeeping force that would have helped the United Nations organize elections in Iraq, according to Saudi and Iraqi officials.
As a result, the UN continues to have a skeletal presence in Iraq, with only four staff members working full time on preparing for elections set for the end of January. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has refused to establish a new UN headquarters in Baghdad unless countries commit troops for a special force to protect it.
Saudi leaders, including Crown Prince Abdullah, personally lobbied Bush in July to sign off on the plan to establish a contingent of several hundred troops from Arab and Muslim nations. Abdullah discussed the plan in a 10-minute phone conversation with Bush on July 28 after meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to Saudi officials familiar with the negotiations.
Diplomats said Annan accepted the plan. But the Bush administration objected because the special force would have been controlled by the UN instead of by U.S. military officers who run the Multi-National Force in Iraq. Muslim and Arab countries refused to work under U.S. command, and the initiative died in early September.
Yet another reason we need to get rid of Bush.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin tells us, again, that the race remains stable. Trump World (and Alex Jones) is crazier than you’d ever imagined. How Howard Stern owned Donald Trump. Russian hacking is real. NC Gop can’t help inflating fire story, implicates, then reverses itself.
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