Today marks the fifth anniversary of a war that has cost over 500 billion dollars so far and almost 4,000 American soldiers. This doesn't count the cost in injured soldiers and dead and injured Iraqi civilians.
Taxpayers in Virginia have paid $12.4 billion for the cost of the Iraq War through 2007. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:
3,459,079 People provided with full Health Care OR
10,196,455 Homes built with Renewable Electricity OR
263,819 new Police Officers OR
186,783 Music and Arts Teachers OR
1,537,441 full Scholarships for University Students OR
772 New Elementary Schools OR
6,226,450 Children provided with Health Care OR
1,722,920 Head Start Places for Children OR
179,848 Elementary School Teachers OR
195,233 Port Container Inspectors
It's easy to quanify some costs. But other costs can't be quanified. What about the emotional toll on children and families when their loved ones don't come home, or come home with traumatic injuries? What about the stress of multiple deployments?
What about the loss of our moral leadership in the world when we have a president who condones torture? What about the loss of our privacy as we give the NSA access to our emails, cell phone conversations and other areas of our lives? What about the cost of living in fear as we listen to the fear-mongering of our leaders? How do we quanify those costs and so many others? What about the stress that families live with? I could go on and on......
Has it been worth the cost? I honestly don't think so.......do you?
By the way...for my readers in other selected states:
Massachusetts has contributed 14.8 billion
Texas 42.7 billion
Pennsylvania 9.9 billion
California 66.2 billion
New Jersey 23.9 billion
If you're interested in learning more about our spending on the war and what we could have for the same amount, visit The National Priorities Project
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Ed:
You may, or may not, be interested in this link which details a new book from Nobel economist Alfred Stieglitz. He estimates the actual cost of this war at $3 trillion when all is said and done...!
Don't kill the messenger!
Greg
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/03/04/trillion_dollar_war/
IRAQ
4,000 Americans, innumerable Iraqis, $3 trillion
Posted on Wed, Mar. 19, 2008Digg del.icio.us AIM reprint print email
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@miamiherald.com
WATHIQ KHUZAIE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
An internally displaced boy carries a toy gun on Wednesday, as he lives in a bombed building in Baghdad, Iraq.
» More Photos
Slide show | Iraq: 5 years of war
Chat LIVE with Pitts from 1 to 2 p.m.
Bush defiantly defends war in Iraq
War protesters halt traffic, recall dead
Shortages fuel Iraqi discontent
Clinton discusses Iraq with young vets
Woman bomber kills 3 in Iraq
List of coalition deaths
South Florida events mark 5 years of war
And five years later, here we are.
There were no weapons of mass destruction. We were not greeted as liberators. The war did not pay for itself. The smoking gun was not a mushroom cloud. There was no connection to 9/11. The course we stayed led over a cliff.
Worse, Iraq has become a recruiting station for Islamic terrorists. One presidential candidate foresees a 100-year occupation. Electricity is still a sometime thing in Baghdad. The war that was supposed to pay for itself was recently projected to cost us $3 trillion -- that's trillion, with a ''t,'' that's a three followed by 12 zeroes, that's three million millions. And American forces have sustained more than 33,000 casualties, including 4,000 dead and 13,000 wounded too severely to return to action.
Pundits and politicians will spend a lot of time debating the war in Iraq on this, its fifth anniversary. They will analyze what we have achieved, pontificate on where we should go from here. I will leave those arguments to them.
Not that those are not worthy issues. But I cannot get beyond what is, for me, the one overriding truth of this war.
It should never have been fought.
Yes, I know: The point is moot. The war was fought, and there is nothing we can do about it. But I submit there is, in fact, at least one thing we must do. Learn from it.
Much has been made of the culpability of the Bush administration, of the arrogance and incompetence that midwifed this mess. Less has been made, however, of the culpability of Bush's accomplices, the enablers and facilitators who made this misadventure possible. By which I mean you and me, the American electorate.
Granted, many of us have been screaming No as loudly as we could from the very beginning or shortly thereafter. But many more refused to own what we knew, refused to accept the evidence of our own eyes and call this administration to account. We were scared beyond the ability to reason and wanted to feel safe, we were too heavily invested in lies to be turned aside by truth, we needed with a desperation to believe what we were being told, to buy what we were being sold.
Excuses. At some point, you have to stand up and be brave. Stand up like American women and men.
This, we have largely failed to do. Three months after the war began, when it was becoming clear there were no weapons of mass destruction, 56 percent of us told Gallup it didn't matter, said the invasion was justified regardless. Play that back again: The primary rationale for the war was disintegrating like a sand castle in the waves, yet a majority of us shrugged and said, ''Whatever.'' Like our president, we were impervious to truths we did not want to know.
That majority is a memory, but it lasted long past the point it should have, lasted long enough to enable this disaster, to send George W. Bush back to office claiming a mandate, to dig us in so deep the sun feels like a rumor, to create legions of new terrorists, to run up a bill that we will be paying off for generations, to take the lives of 4,000 Americans and Lord only knows how many Iraqis.
So yes, we should at the very least learn from this, commit it to communal memory, so that maybe next time a fear-mongering leader tries to stampede us into precipitate and unwise action, we will have the guts to stop and reason and own what we know. And to realize that the electorate has a role to play in the life of a free nation and it is not a mindless cheerleader.
One can only hope. In the meantime, here we are, five years later. The electorate has largely moved on, more concerned about the price of gas than the price of war.
But the war grinds on. Indeed, it has ground the president's approval rating down to the low 30s.
Maybe you think that's accountability at last. Me, I'm surprised it's still that high.
mogul667@yahoo.com
Post a Comment