The U.S. has spent $1.5 trillion so far fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mind you, both of these wars were completely unnecessary. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And the Taliban offered to turn over to us Osama bin Laden, who was on a dialysis machine in Kandahar, if we didn't bomb them. So we bombed them!
Analysts
are predicting that when all of the ancillary expenses are added in,
including the interest on the money we borrowed to fight these two bogus
wars, the combined total cost will be $4-6 trillion.
Now to add insult to injury, I'll take this a step further.
With the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Americans were promised a peace
dividend. With the Cold War competition over, we could now reduce the
defense budget and devote more of our tax dollars to those domestic
items which would make life for everyone in the country better __
schools and libraries, parks, community and infrastructure investment,
better education, recreational facilities, maybe child care services,
improved health care.
The peace dividend never happened. For 16 of the 24 subsequent years, military spending increased. In fact over two-and-a-half decades, the U.S. spent over $2.5 trillion beyond the level of military spending in 1992.
$2.5 trillion!
Instead of us getting a peace dividend, defense allocations went up __ way up
__ adding enormously to the national debt and cutting short all of
those wonderful things that were supposed to happen since we were
entering a new, more peaceful phase of our history.
Interestingly, the more we spent on military, the more conflict and war there was.
You have to wonder if this was a mere coincidence.
Now with the military budget more than twice what it was in 2000 __ and this is just the official military budget which doesn't include a mind-boggling assortment of black budget allocations and defense spending tucked away in other departments __ we live in a more dangerous world than ever, with whole countries destroyed, jihadists, like ISIS, the Nusra Front, al Qaeda, neo-Nazis rampaging from one end of the planet to the other, and a whole multitude of crises brewing in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Africa, and the South China Sea.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. is being called the Empire of Chaos in many parts of the world. Recently, in an international survey by WIN and Gallup,
America easily won the #1 spot as "the greatest threat to peace" on the
planet. China and Pakistan were a distant second and third. Yaaay!
Go America!
We are without any doubt militarily the most powerful nation on Earth, arguably the most powerful nation in history.
We already spend almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined!
With all of this military might, we have lost every single conflict __ except one which could have been won by a high school soccer team __ since World War II.
The obvious question is . . .
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
