The Mideast Money Drain
With the economy in a nosedive, the Democratic Congress is beginning to turn its anti-war focus on the dollars that are being drained by Bush’s Mideast policies.
“In a shift from last year’s failed legislative efforts to force a reduction of troops,” the New York Times reports, “the Democrats’ new approach is…focusing on the financial cost of military operations and on the war’s implications for the nation’s troubled economy.”
This coupling comes on the heels of a new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict” by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz with Linda Bilmes, which estimates that Iraq has already cost almost ten times as much as the first Gulf War, almost a third more than Vietnam and twice as much as the First World War.
Stiglitz told a British think tank this week that war spending was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch after our central bank responded to the financial drain by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.
Read more.
5 Responses to “The Mideast Money Drain”
[...] The Moderate Voice – Domestic and international news analysis, irreverent comments, original reporti… wrote an interesting post today on The Mideast Money DrainHere’s a quick excerptThe Mideast Money Drain February 28th, 2008 by ROBERT STEIN With the economy in a nosedive, the Democratic Congress is beginning to turn its anti-war focus on the dollars that are being drained by Bush’s Mideast policies. “In a shift from last year’s failed legislative efforts to force a reduction of troops,” the New York Times reports, “the Democrats’ new approach is…focusing on the financial cost of military operations and on the war’s implications for the nation’s troubled economy.” Thi [...]
And to think, Larry Lindsay was fired for estimating the war's cost at 500 million! The miscalculations made by the administration on their ME policy have been breathtaking.
Would Bush have raced into Iraq knowing it would cost more American lives than the attacks on 9/11 and cost 60 times what he estimated? Yeah, probably.
It's a smart move to point out what we're giving up when we spend so much of our resources and attention continuing the occupation in Iraq.
I actually wrote a post yesterday on Why We Worry somewhat related to this topic. While our eyes are zeroed in on the Middle East, we've completely lost sight of the challenges and opportunities involved with a rising China, India, Russia, EU, etc. And for what? Are we getting anything out of Iraq that's going to be worth the blood and money we're putting into it?
Of course the true cost of the war was minimized as was the projected length of our involvement and the resistance being put up by the insurgency (no one was allowed to tell the president that one existed for a long time after the initial invasion) This had to be due to the advice they were getting from Henry Kissenger who told Rumsfeld that Vietnam was lost in the war of public opinion. If we had no need to sacrifice and didn't feel a pinch in our pockets, support for the war would remain strong.