It’s kinda odd…
It is like hearing only the one point of view coming from the woman, that she and her man of 35 years were splitting up, and in that report was her accusation that he was a deadbeat, wouldn’t show her affection, couldn’t perform when it counted, and was selfish, uncaring, and just impossible to live with… Then you hear from another source, that it was her who abandoned the family, and ran off with another man, leaving her husband of 35 years to care for the children, and run the household as a single dad.
But no one reports that. All they talk about is how she should take him for every penny and that she deserves to be happy too…
It is sort of that way with the war. It has almost been a full week since Obama has announced the end of the Iraqi War.
What fills the media?
That every Republican Presidential candidate has said it is a mistake. That Republicans in Congress, while they are taking credit for all the happiness coming from the news back home, in Washington, are trying to stymie the winding down of military action… That even within the Obama administration enterprising reporters were still able to find some voices of dissension that perhaps we were being a little too hasty in running out on Iraq…
All the argument is over Iraq…
Uhh, hello?… whose money is it that we’re spending?.. Uhh.. Shouldn’t that huge portion of the argument get some play?
I mean it would around a family dinner table. “Dad, I want to go to Harvard… It will cost $40,000 a year… ” “Nope, can’t afford it. You’ll need to rethink your future.”
Or in a bedroom, “Honey, we need all new furniture. I’ll put in on layaway this next Monday… ” “Nope, can’t afford it. You’ll need to rethink your priorities.”
Or in ones car. “Dad, I need the PS3.. My PS2 and PS1 games are all out of date.” “Nope, can’t afford it. You’ll need to rethink your spare time.”
Just the actual occupation of Iraq, cost us $720 million each day.
Isn’t it ironical that those who very same who were willing to gamble with our nation’s credit rating to cut expenses, are the very ones calling out Obama for turning off the spigot? Doesn’t that just sound like a bunch of hypocrites?
Just to give you an idea as to what that money could be otherwise spent on, here is a list compiled by a group that is against the war. No doubt it has probably had it’s numbers bumped up, but still it gives you a general feeling and some insight into what else that $720 million could be used…
One Day of the Iraq War = 720 Million Dollars, How Would You Spend it?
One Day of the Iraq War = 84 New Elementary Schools
One Day of the Iraq War = 12,478 Elementary School Teachers
One Day of the Iraq War = 95,364 Head Start Places for Children
One Day of the Iraq War = 1,153,846 Children with Free School Lunches
One Day of the Iraq War = 34,904 Four-Year Scholarships for University Students
One Day of the Iraq War = 163,525 People with Health Care
One Day of the Iraq War = 423,529 Children with Health Care
One Day of the Iraq War = 6,482 Families with Homes
One Day of the Iraq War = 1,274,336 Homes with Renewable Energy….
One Day of the Iraq WAr = $2.34 dollars each day into the pocket of every American man, woman, or child… One week =$16.38… One month = $70.36 .. One quarter gets rounded up to $213 and if cumulated over an entire year… 365.25 days… Every man, every women, every child, every toddler, every infant, is being costed by the war…$854 dollars!!!!
So why is no one talking about it?
Let’s backtrack to 2003 one month before we went in.
In a March 16, 2003 Meet the Press interview of Vice President Dick Cheney, held less than a week before the Iraq War began, host Tim Russert reported that “every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion, recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement.”
And here is the actual outcomes.
FY2003 Supplemental: Operation Iraqi Freedom: Passed April 2003; Total $78.5 billion, $54.4 billion Iraq War
FY2004 Supplemental: Iraq and Afghanistan Ongoing Operations/Reconstruction: Passed November 2003; Total $87.5 billion, $70.6 billion Iraq War
FY2004 DoD Budget Amendment: $25 billion Emergency Reserve Fund (Iraq Freedom Fund): Passed July 2004, Total $25 billion, $21.5 billion (estimated) Iraq War
FY2005 Emergency Supplemental: Operations in the War on Terror; Activities in Afghanistan; Tsunami Relief: Passed April 2005, Total $82 billion, $58 billion (estimated) Iraq War
FY2006 Department of Defense appropriations: Total $50 billion, $40 billion (estimated) Iraq War.
FY2006 Emergency Supplemental: Operations Global War on Terror; Activities in Iraq & Afghanistan: Passed February 2006, Total $72.4 billion, $60 billion (estimated) Iraq War
FY2007 Department of Defense appropriations: $70 billion(estimated) for Iraq War-related costs
FY2007 Emergency Supplemental (proposed) $100 billion
FY2008 Bush administration has proposed around $190 billion for the Iraq War and Afghanistan
FY2009 Obama administration has proposed around $130 billion in additional funding for the Iraq War and Afghanistan.
FY2011 Obama administration proposes around $159.3 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Kind of a little more than the total cost of $100 billion that Cheney alluded to.
That’s the problem with Republicans… “We gotta go to war. We gotta go to war. If we leave they might collapse… ”
with no clue of how to pay for it.. No clue that going to war costs money. So it becomes a choice of where better to spend our money. Here at home? or in Iraq?
Drumroll please: The obvious answer is……….
Clueless as Republicans were, they put that war on our credit card. They did not raise revenues one tick to cover the extra expense. They took out a loan to finance the entire operation.
According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion dollars by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money. The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen….
So Cheney’s $100 billion will cost us $2.7 Trillion counting interest paid… And the cost of caring for the humans who survied, is not even included.
We just can’t afford it. Some may say it is a hard decision. Some may say it is a wrong decision. Most will say it was an overdue decision, and it’s about damn time that someone did it.
It’s just funny how no one, no one is reporting the finances lurking behind this decision that made such a decision a no-brainer. There is no other choice really, but to let Iraqi’s handle their affairs themselves.
kavips 
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 24, 2011 at 6:57 am
Steve Newton
As far as it goes, I am with your argument–you know I am not an interventionist in the first place. However, and it’s a big “however,” Democrats back in 2003 signed onto that war big time, and it is not sufficient to say, “Bush lied.”
Senior Dems in the intelligence committee had full access to the thin information about WMDs, etc., and chose to give the President a blank check because they were more concerned with the 2004 elections than the doing what was right.
Politicians of both major parties are full hostages to the military-industrial complex.
President Obama deserves as much praise for getting us out of the war as Richard Nixon did in Vietnam.
Nonetheless that has to be tempered by doubling down in Afghanistan to fight his own “war of choice” mandated–you guessed it–by electoral politics.
October 24, 2011 at 12:28 pm
kavips
You may not know this story. And I got to hand this one to Dick Cheney. I hope to one day get mileage out of the same trick.
He called Jay Rockefeller into the office, to cover Iraq, then swore him under the Secrecy Act to be able to brief him on the Iraqi War. There he laid out the whole plan, the war was for regime change, the war was to access oil, the war was to test our military tactics. and Jay was beside himself. As the war progressed he knew all of this, but without being thrown in a military prison and trusting a “military” tribunal to release him, he could not speak up…
And when the “Democratic” chairman of the Intelligence committee acquiesces to Dick Cheney, it is no wonder that other Democrats not in the know, would also fall in line.
Keep in mind, most of us thought there realistically could be weapons of mass destruction that could go off at any notice.. That’s what everyone was reporting, even Colin Powell.. Perhaps they were even lying in a cargo hold of some ship that would casually pull up to our base in San Diego harbor. .. It was only afterward that we realized that we, the American People, had information withheld which could have provided a more balanced judgment..
History is history; other’s can argue that. I tend to follow the admonishment that “old men argue history; young men make it.” line.
I’m not sure if you are jesting when you say President Obama deserves as much praise for jumping out of Iraq as Richard Nixon did for Vietnam, but I will take the bait… and twist it as I am prone to do… lol.
I would argue (playing the part of an old man now, ha ha) that it is not the same. … Richard Nixon had much more to contend with in extracting us from Vietnam, than does Obama in pulling us out of Iraq. I will acquiesce that there are some general similarities however.
One difference though: Richard Nixon had to go against the core of his party ( the Hawks) in pulling us out. Two, in doing so, he looked weak to his core, (again the Hawks) for appearing to capitulate to a bunch of crazed out hippies who didn’t take baths or work real jobs for a living, and didn’t even listen to good old polka!!!!!!
On the other side, Obama is catering TO the core of his party (get us out now) and is being perceived by that same core, to be the brave leader overcoming the abused prescription drugged crazed “ex-hippies”, who probably don’t take baths, and definitely don’t work real jobs for a living, simply because they are on talk radio…
Secondly. Leaving Iraq, is like us leaving Vietnam in 1960. Things are stable, the government is functioning. There is little for America to do there. We do not have to hang our heads in shame as we did seeing the last helicopter leave the US embassy with thousands of our loyal supporters clinging to the stairways up to the heliopad, Nixon pulled us out, as things were falling down, crashing and burning. That is politically a much harder thing to do. I feel the far more comfortable choice would have been continue the war….
Yes, lots of people don’t like Richard Nixon, making it easy to pick on him. But anyone who has ever had to go against the flow of attitude to exercise ones conscience, can fully appreciate the strength of the core of that man Richard Nixon. He certainly wasn’t wishy washy, and anyone who, when North Vietnam walked away from the Peace Negotiations, had the balls to exercise the power of B52’s to bring them back quickly, is a pretty good man after all. He promised to end the war; he delivered.
On to Afghanistan; we were scheduled to begin pulling out in July 2011. That has passed, and as prescribed, troops are now coming home. The 30,000 additional troops we sent, were intended to create a window for diplomatic and counter-terror sources to create a stable Afghanistan, which boils down to saying… an Afghanistan that was run on something other than corruption.
It appears that we failed here on the diplomatic front. Afghans voted for Karzai, so corruption will remain. But we are getting out anyways which again, appeals to, not pisses off , Obama’s core. Doing so is his way, just like Nixon, of living up to the promises he made on his bid for the presidency.
As for this being what you called a “war of his choice”, I will disagree on one tenant. I argue that he inherited this quagmire and has to play the cards with which he was dealt. I happen to believe the correct decisions were made and that all sides were looked out when mapping out the policy.
What often gets overlooked by everyone (except those with contacts in India) is that Pakistan, has nukes. And so does it’s sworn blood India, who shares a border, over which they are even contesting as we speak.
So, we need to be an influence in Pakistan. In a funny sort of way, Afghanistan has created just the right balance in that arena, that gives us that option.
Reminder: sometimes a careful, balance approach is never fully appreciated in real time. It is only after the hand as played itself out, and the score gets tallied, that the wisdom of restraint, becomes appreciated.
(I subsequently realized I never touched your claim that both parties are beholden to the military-industrial complex. That is a true statement, if ever true statements were allowed on blogs… lol. )