Zigzagman
5-11-11, 10:44am
I just don't see this as a left/right issue. Maybe it is time to really think about what we have been doing for the last decade. Supporting war is not patriotic, it is death and destruction and never a good thing albeit sometimes necessary - in this case, I think not. I have a nephew deployed in Iraq who is pretty much thinking the same thing. This discussion is taking place amongst soldiers in the privacy of their "chu" (containerized housing unit). They miss their families and their mission is not combat but supply chain stuff? They are soldiers.......
From HuffandPuff Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/11/reassessing-the-cost-of-9-11-bin-laden_n_860186.html) -
WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden's death doesn’t end the post-9/11 era, but it does provide an occasion to look back at everything that’s happened since the attacks nearly 10 years ago and reassess the costs.
It’s been a long, grueling and enormously expensive time for this country, a time of endless war and massive fortification, of borrowed money and of missed opportunities. There’s the human toll. More than twice as many Americans -- over 6,000 (http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf) -- have now died in the two wars that followed 9/11 than did in the original attacks, along with more than 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/). Over three million Iraqis (http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,,,IRQ,,4dbe90c22b,0.html) and 400,000 Afghans (http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?page=country&docid=4db6619914) remain displaced. Several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers suffer from long-term war-related injuries and health problems, with more than 200,000 (http://www.dvbic.org/TBI-Numbers.aspx) diagnosed with traumatic brain injury alone.
And there’s the extraordinary financial toll. Indeed, even as Washington officials panic about the growing deficit, much of the problem can be traced back to 9/11 -- not to the attack itself, but to the response, and particularly to the decision to go to war in Iraq.
The actual 9/11 attacks produced insured losses of about $40 billion (http://web.docuticker.com/go/docubase/31648) and delivered a temporary blow to the economy. But that was just the very beginning of the financial hemorrhage.Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes and Nobel-Prize winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz now estimate that the two post-9/11 wars will end up costing taxpayers somewhere between $4 trillion and $6 trillion (http://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central-1.8040/study-wars-could-cost-4-trillion-to-6-trillion-1.120054). That includes not only money already appropriated for the military campaigns ($1.3 trillion at last count (http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf)), but also the immense cost of long-term health care for returning soldiers, and such things as interest payments on all the extra borrowed money and the increased volatility of oil prices since the invasion of Iraq.
"One of the main reasons that our national debt has increased so much over this past decade is because of the spending on the wars and the military buildup,” Bilmes told The Huffington Post. “All of that money has been borrowed.”
Peace
From HuffandPuff Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/11/reassessing-the-cost-of-9-11-bin-laden_n_860186.html) -
WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden's death doesn’t end the post-9/11 era, but it does provide an occasion to look back at everything that’s happened since the attacks nearly 10 years ago and reassess the costs.
It’s been a long, grueling and enormously expensive time for this country, a time of endless war and massive fortification, of borrowed money and of missed opportunities. There’s the human toll. More than twice as many Americans -- over 6,000 (http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf) -- have now died in the two wars that followed 9/11 than did in the original attacks, along with more than 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/). Over three million Iraqis (http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,,,IRQ,,4dbe90c22b,0.html) and 400,000 Afghans (http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?page=country&docid=4db6619914) remain displaced. Several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers suffer from long-term war-related injuries and health problems, with more than 200,000 (http://www.dvbic.org/TBI-Numbers.aspx) diagnosed with traumatic brain injury alone.
And there’s the extraordinary financial toll. Indeed, even as Washington officials panic about the growing deficit, much of the problem can be traced back to 9/11 -- not to the attack itself, but to the response, and particularly to the decision to go to war in Iraq.
The actual 9/11 attacks produced insured losses of about $40 billion (http://web.docuticker.com/go/docubase/31648) and delivered a temporary blow to the economy. But that was just the very beginning of the financial hemorrhage.Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes and Nobel-Prize winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz now estimate that the two post-9/11 wars will end up costing taxpayers somewhere between $4 trillion and $6 trillion (http://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central-1.8040/study-wars-could-cost-4-trillion-to-6-trillion-1.120054). That includes not only money already appropriated for the military campaigns ($1.3 trillion at last count (http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf)), but also the immense cost of long-term health care for returning soldiers, and such things as interest payments on all the extra borrowed money and the increased volatility of oil prices since the invasion of Iraq.
"One of the main reasons that our national debt has increased so much over this past decade is because of the spending on the wars and the military buildup,” Bilmes told The Huffington Post. “All of that money has been borrowed.”
Peace