Had we done nothing, I mean nothing at all, we would be better off than what the Bush plan has brought us. What we should have done is went into Afganistan and killed every living thing until there was nothing left to kill. Mission completed, and the rest of our enemies would have received the message loud and clear. Instead, Afganistan is still as screwed up as ever, along with Iraq. Iran, Russia and China still do whatever they want, as usual. And what was the cost for this mess? Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. For what? Nothing of substance. Absolutley nothing!
Saddam kept Iran in check,Saddam would not have let Iran start a nuclear weapons program.With Saddam out of power guess who has to deal with it ? Then theres the cost of taking Saddam out of power http://articles.marketwatch.com/201...nd-afghanistan-veterans-budgetary-assessments Iraq war ends with a $4 trillion IOU Veteransâ health care costs to rise sharply over the next 40 years December 15, 2011|Christopher Hinton, MarketWatch WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) â The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion. Over a 50-year period, that comes to $80 billion annually. Although that only represents about 1% of nationâs gross domestic product, itâs more than half of the national budget deficit. Itâs also roughly equal to what the U.S. spends on the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency combined each year. Near the start of the war, the U.S. Defense Department estimated it would cost $50 billion to $80 billion. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was dismissed in 2002 after suggesting the price of invading and occupying Iraq could reach $200 billion. âThe direct costs for the war were about $800 billion, but the indirect costs, the costs you canât easily see, that payoff will outlast you and me,â said Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at American Progress, a Washington, D.C. think tank, and a former assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan. Those costs include interest payments on the billions borrowed to fund the war; the cost of maintaining military bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain to defend Iraq or reoccupy the country if the Baghdad government unravels; and the expense of using private security contractors to protect U.S. property in the country and to train Iraqi forces. Caring for veterans, more than 2 million of them, could alone reach $1 trillion, according to Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, in Congressional testimony in July. Other experts said that was too conservative and anticipate twice that amount. The advance in medical technology has helped more soldiers survive battlefield injuries, but followup care can often last a lifetime and be costly. More than 32,000 soldiers were wounded in Iraq, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Add in Afghanistan and that number jumps to 47,000. Altogether, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost the U.S. between $4 trillion and $6 trillion, more than half of which would be due to the fighting in Iraq, said Neta Crawford, a political science professor at Brown University. Her numbers, which are backed by similar studies at Columbia and Harvard universities, estimate the U.S. has already spent $2 trillion on the wars after including debt interest and the higher cost of veteransâ disabilities. The annual budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs has more than doubled since 2003 to a requested $132.2 billion for fiscal 2012. That amount is expected to rise sharply over the next four decades as lingering health problems for veterans become more serious as they grow older. Costs for Vietnam veterans did not peak until 30 or 40 years after the end of the war, according to Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. âWe will have a vast overhang in domestic costs for caring for the wounded and covering retirement expenditure of the war fighters,â said Loren Thompson, a policy expert with the Lexington Institute. âThe U.S. will continue to incur major costs for decades to come.â
I'm an old southern blue dog democrat. My voter i.d. still reads DEM, although it drives my wife mad, she says she could be married to a democrat but never be friends with one. LOL I haven't voted for a democrat in many, many years as my party literally "left" me decades ago. fwiw
No, no, no, we are not indiscriminate killers like the Taliban or AlQaeda... I know it's hard to explain, but that's not who we are, even if we pay the price sometimes.
We didn't have to be. A handful of special ops troops with local militias dislodged the taliban in short order. We should have gotten out then. That would have left the State Department with nothing to do, and also a lot of military brass were annoyed over the fact that hundreds of thousands of troops had not been needed. How do you construct a glorious career as a combat commander when local warlords already did the job? So we went into Afghanistan in this idiotic nation-building exercise, instead of leaving them to figure it out. And basically got our ass handed to us.
So he's been content to have Congress submit no budget ever since. hmm in what 3rdworld sh!thole does that fly?
Obama is a known communist, and will continue to play class warfare under the guise of fairness as if government can ever solve anyone's problems. But, hey! Fair is Fair! I've looked past what a pitiful campaign McCain ran, but when it comes to my vote for Obama, the man has destroyed the economic viability of our country. His only credit is having killed Bin Laden. His record on jobs and the economy is terrible since U6 unemployment is above 15+% and more than 60 percent of 18-35 year olds are unemployed and living with parents or otherwise not gainfully employed when the greed of the boomers comes home and they all have to sell their stocks to make up for the massive dead weight loss the government's pulling in due to military expenditures in which we are the global police cheif, and control every part of the World Bank and won't ever give that up.