Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.— Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican President, 1953

The Cost of War—

The One We Didn’t Win

By James Preston Allen, Publisher

So, President Barack Obama has announced the beginning of the end, but not the end or the winning of the war in Iraq –– a war we should never have fought; a war whose final cost will total around $3 trillion! A war in which we have sacrificed some 4,412 of our soldiers and thousands more injured for life. And, lets not forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians maimed and killed. No matter how much we have spent on “reconstruction,” we have left a nation in ruins.

An article I read the other day said that we have spent some $400 billion in reconstruction projects there. Many are still incomplete such as the state of the art sanitation plant in Fallujah that was built at a cost of some $107 million. The American contractors just forgot one thing: the pipeline that connects the city sewer system to the sanitation plant! This is just one example of many nation building contracts that we have left the Iraqi government to inherit, whether they wanted them or not. …Now on to Afghanistan.

The national relief that our president is “turning the page” on this unseemly enterprise and not trying to dress it up as some kind of “victory” is a testament to his own integrity, even though he fell short in not calling former president what he is: a scoundrel and a thief. My thoughts still concern the 50,000 troops that remain and what if anything our military leaders, or the public at large, have learned from the experience of the Bush-Cheney- Rumsfeld years of “Shock and Awe” and crisis mismanagement. Hopefully, this generation of citizens––citizens born after the Vietnam War—have learned to distrust leaders that are too eager for war from this lost decade.

The admonishments from President Eisenhower about not trusting the “military industrial complex” or the quote used above about what signifies a theft do not come to us from the mind of some wild radical, but one who had witnessed the tragic stupidity of war, even the ones he felt justified to fight, like World War II. In fact, the majority of military leaders and even those who were engaged in the actual combat are often the ones who question the rationale forever going to war again. And once again to quote, President Eisenhower, the one U.S. President whose credentials on war are irrefutable: “I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.”

Yet, the very same President that has just ended our conflict in Iraq is committed to continuing the war in Afghanistan, which has now devolved into just another waste of lives, corruption and misdirected waste of taxes. But do we hear from the extreme rightwingers about this extreme waste of tax dollars, the inability to audit the Pentagon’s expenses in Iraq, or the corrupt no-bid contracts? No. What we are getting from these folks is all about balancing the national budget with what’s left over.

That which is left after we’ve bailed out the banks and the Wall Street venture capitalists; that which is left after seven years of a desperately futile attempt to steal the oil rights from a sovereign nation run by a brutal dictator; that which is left in our treasury after giving tax breaks to corporations that off-shore and out-source jobs to overseas workers.

There is nary a complaint of these most egregious siphons to our national economy, but more hoopla and distraction about immigrants coming here to take jobs away from American citizens, who aren’t about to pick strawberries or work in a car wash. Like most of the rhetoric coming from the far-right and the media owned by the billionaire’s club on immigration, tax cuts don’t address the real issues of why there is high unemployment, why there’s less money circulating in the market, or even why California has an annual budget crisis. All of these issues that the conservatives rail about should be discussed under the topic of “this is what you get in globalizing our economy.”

Any attempt to justify downsizing government by eliminating social services to the poor, the unemployed, or of reducing public health services or education is merely an attempt to marginalize large segments of our citizenry and to once again place the burden of government on to the backs of middle class workers. This is especially true when it comes to support for higher education, which if we weren’t in debt for the Bush wars and Wall Street corruptions, we could subsidize education to the extent that any citizen with the grades could go to college without having to mortgage their future.