The Iraq war, a war of choice for the neocon, is rarely viewed by the TELL AMERICA press as a cost object. But how much did the Iraq war cost and would a non-neocon American political party have added a second war to the Afghanistan war?
The Washington Post has said:
THE RECKONING
The Iraq War Will Cost Us $3 Trillion, and Much More
By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz
Sunday, March 9, 2008
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free war. The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can’t spend $3 trillion — yes, $3 trillion — on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.
Some people will scoff at that number, but we’ve done the math. Senior Bush administration aides certainly pooh-poohed worrisome estimates in the run-up to the war. Former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey reckoned that the conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later called his estimate “baloney.” Administration officials insisted that the costs would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion. In April 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, the thoughtful head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said on “Nightline” that reconstructing Iraq would cost the American taxpayer just $1.7 billion. Ted Koppel, in disbelief, pressed Natsios on the question, but Natsios stuck to his guns. Others in the administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, hoped that U.S. partners would chip in, as they had in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, or that Iraq’s oil would pay for the damages.
The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is not only the second longest war in U.S. history (after Vietnam), it is also the second most costly — surpassed only by World War II.
Why doesn’t the public understand the staggering scale of our expenditures? In part because the administration talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is apparently still an emergency five years after the war began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now running at $12 billion a month — $16 billion if you include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we’ll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.
But the costs to our society and economy are far greater. When a young soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, his or her family will receive a U.S. government check for just $500,000 (combining life insurance with a “death gratuity”) — far less than the typical amount paid by insurance companies for the death of a young person in a car accident. The stark “budgetary cost” of $500,000 is clearly only a fraction of the total cost society pays for the loss of life — and no one can ever really compensate the families. Moreover, disability pay seldom provides adequate compensation for wounded troops or their families. Indeed, in one out of five cases of seriously injured soldiers, someone in their family has to give up a job to take care of them.
But beyond this is the cost to the already sputtering U.S. economy. All told, the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that’s a conservative estimate.
President Bush tried to sell the American people on the idea that we could have a war with little or no economic sacrifice. Even after the United States went to war, Bush and Congress cut taxes, especially on the rich — even though the United States already had a massive deficit. So the war had to be funded by more borrowing. By the end of the Bush administration, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the cumulative interest on the increased borrowing used to fund them, will have added about $1 trillion to the national debt. …
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702846.html
Why would a political party, of sound mind and body, willfully take on such a huge cost in lives and money? Lets remove the sound body condition – but retain the sound mind condition.
Why would a political party of sound mind willfully take on such a huge cost in lives and money? The answer to that question might be found here:
In the foreign policy field, concepts like detente, containment and negotiation make little sense to the neocons who are more interested in an outright war against all their enemies. In this sense, the neocons draw much from an unlikely source, someone who influenced many of them in their youth: Leon Trotsky. Many prominent acolytes of Trotsky within the U.S. took to the path of conservatism, most dramatically, James Burnham, who wrote the 1964 anti-liberal screed `Suicide of the West’ and then won the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan. Irving Kristol began his political life at the City University of New York in the 1930s as a follower of Trotsky, whose own critique of the USSR allowed Kristol to abandon an early flirtation with Marxism.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2102/stories/20040130000506400.htm
And where was America’s Congress? Prior to 2006, it was standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Mr. Bush. The business-centric politics of the neocons produced lucrative business opportunities for the politically connected businesses:
Halliburton, a Texas-based oil service company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, is the leading profiteer from the Iraq war with military and oil service contracts potentially worth $18 billion.
http://www.erichufschmid.net/TFC/Bollyn-Halliburton-Cheney.html
So why did the neocons elect to start a war of choice that would add a heavy burden to America? America’s citizens tried to stop the neocon’s Iraq war but America is a Republic not a Democracy.
The neocons are in a class by themselves
