Good timing. The country is enthralled/disgusted at the current negotiations taking place between the Republican Party leadership and President Obama over how to reduce the budget and/or increase revenues over the next ten years, and a new study comes out detailing the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the last ten years. Symmetry.
http://costsofwar.org/...
A just released study, which took more than a year to complete, called the “Costs of War” is calling attention to the horrendous costs of the two wars in human, economic, social/political and environmental terms. The study was completed under the auspices of the Eisenhower Study Group, led by Prof. Neta Crawford of Boston University and Prof Catherine Lutz from Brown University with contributions from a significant number of noted economists, anthropologists, lawyers and political scientists.
The costs of the wars the last ten years (monetarily) - $4 trillion
Possible budget cuts to non-defense programs including to entitlement programs for the next ten years - $4 trillion
Costs of wars the next ten years: priceless
Amazing. The company line is all of that is to keep us safe. Still believe it? Actually I should change that, we're humanitarians as well. We'll need to maintain the massive global military might for that too.
That’s not counting of course the other costs of the wars which are detailed in the study. Even after a year of study the authors admit that they’ve yet to examine the total costs.
We’re talking about the ILLEGAL Iraq war that is now in it’s ninth year with the administration working like hell to extend past the 12/31/11 withdrawal date as agreed upon by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed by President Bush . And the Afghanistan war, the longest official war in U.S. history which was attacked after the 9/11 attack under the premise that the Taliban aided Al Qaeda with it’s evil deed.
The utter absurdity of the current deficit/debt “negotiations” is no better illustrated than by comparing the costs of war over the last ten years versus the austerity measures being proposed for the next ten years. Couple that with the FACT, and it is going to be a FACT, that the next ten years will cost even more to maintain the Global Imperial Military War Machine, shows we had better stop it now.
Stop the Machine! End the Wars!
http://october2011.org/...
But let me emphasize, our costs are nothing compared to those we've attacked.