The Cost of War!


Here’s where we have to draw the line folks.

It sickens me near to death to hear the same specious arguments being made over and over again by those who not delight in War but profit from it. Shouldn’t there be a place in Dante’s Inferno just for them?

And sadly, when they take up their false arguments, they argue against us for wanting peace. The implication is that we mournful wusses who think that war is dishonorable and a sickening display of macho power, do not understand the true meaning of war—as if there could be any logic in wanton destruction; nor do they mention that most sacrifices are made by the innocents on both sides.

Well, many of us, myself included, are here to tell you that War isn’t what you think—it’s either bloody or boring and it is the worst way for man to solve his problems. That being said, don’t say that to a republican who thinks war is some kind of sacred relic, yet when they come to balancing the budget, the republican never suggests touching the war budget as if to do so would guarantee immediate defeat for America.

I’m here to set this whole conversation right through the simple expedient of examining its costs, in terms of dollars and cents only, not the cost in terms of lives and suffering and pain. I’ll leave that for another day.

Truth to tell, while our army has grown smaller, the military budget keeps growing as if it has a life of its own until today it approaches 1 trillion dollars. If ever there was a place to cut back, it is the military budget!....
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Yet, few people in the Pentagon are willing to face facts. And those who review such budgets have an axe to grind. Meanwhile, the public, brain-washed and anaesthetized as it is, believes that if we were to cut one cent from the budget, the sky would fall upon our heads; there is no underestimating the stupidity of the American public.

Why are we where we are?

The fact of the matter is when Clinton closed out his tenure, we were ahead in every category . So, how did we go from a budget surplus to where we are today.

Well, of course, we gave the rich a tax break and we went to war in Iraq.

A war that was not only unnecessary and had nothing to do with 9/11, it was based on speculation and rumor and make-shift research with no basis in proof. But we’ve discussed that elsewhere. But what we haven’t fully discussed is the fact that Americans are saddled with a 1 trillion dollar debt for Iraq and by the time we exit Afghanistan, another trillion dollars in debt….all the while, extending tax breaks for the rich.

Now, this may not seem like much, but consider what we could do an extra 2 trillion dollars in our budget.

Consider just the suffering areas, like education and infrastructure.

In Education, let’s assume that you could put up a pretty nice school for ten million dollars and that you can budget a new teacher for 50,000 dollars. If you spent a trillion dollars on teachers and a trillion dollars on school infrastructure using those guidelines, you would come away with the following:

20 million new teachers and 100,000 new schools! We’ll, realistically, we probably don’t need that many schools and teachers but we could use about 25% of that and shuffle some of the left-over money into needed infrastructure.

Or let’s look at it another way.

Let’s take that same amount of money, and divide it evenly across the board in each state, although the smarter way would be to divide it by population; but for the sake of example, what that would mean is that each State would average out at about 20 billion dollars per state. That would put us a long way back to rebuilding an infrastructure that for the most part hasn’t been improved in decades and set us on a path to modernization that’s been lagging for all too long.

That, my friend, is the price we are paying to conduct unneeded wars in places that as soon as we leave will return to what they have been doing for generations.

I’m sorry for that, you can be sure. But I also do not see America cast permanently in the role of the world’s policeman and you can reinforce what I’m saying when you write the president, your local newspaper and your elected officials and remind them of that.

In the meantime, nothing we say or do, will return the more than 4,000 who gave up their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and the more than 100,000 wounded who may never be fully rehabilitated. That, my friend, is the true cost of War!....

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon