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I don’t have much to say one way or the other on Mark
Hyman’s editorial about the need for better Pentagon accounting practices.
Sure, it would be nice if they could get their act together. No argument here.
The larger issue isn’t how well our tax money is being accounted for
by the Pentagon, but how it’s being spent. Specifically, I’m thinking
about the hundreds of billions of dollars conned out of the American people
by an administration that promised us that the unilateral invasion of Iraq would
make us safer, would create respect for America in the region and around the
world, and would pay for itself.
Of course, it’s done none of these things. In fact, it’s done the
exact opposite.
Just in terms of the money spent thus far, here are some of the things
that could have been bought for the money that has been worse than wasted in
Iraq:
A year’s salary for 5 million teachers.
Health care for 173 million children for a year.
A year of Headstart for 38 million children.
Four-year college scholarships for 14 million students.
2.5 million public housing units.
Fully fund 12 years of global anti-hunger efforts.
Fully fund global anti-AIDS healthcare for 28 years.
Provide immunization of every child on earth against common
diseases for nearly a century.
Oh, and for you supply-siders out there, the money would provide
a tax cut of over $2,600 for every household in America.
These are according to the National Priorities Project website. I’ve
rounded the numbers because they are going up literally by the second.
And they’re using a conservative estimate. Two scholars (one from Harvard,
the other from Columbia) have studied what the true cost of the war is to Americans,
based not only on the direct costs, but on the indirect (but very real) costs
of throwing so much money away. They conclude that the true cost to the nation
of Bush’s Iraq invasion stands somewhere between one and two trillion
dollars, as of the date of the study (January, 2006).
And who knows what’s been lost to us forever because of the deaths
of 2,500 young men and women in their prime, to say nothing of the number seriously
wounded, and the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who have died.
That’s a loss no accounting can measure.
And that’s The Counterpoint.
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Read from Looking Glass News
Iraq
War Costs Now Exceed Vietnam's
Iraq
war is costing $100,000 per minute
Financial
Cost of Iraq War
Iraq
War Could Cost US Over $2 Trillion, says Nobel Prize-Winning Economist
IRAQ'S
CIVIL WAR HAS COST $3,000 PER U.S. FAMILY-- SO FAR
Mass
Murder Has Cost Us More Than They Promised
Iraq
war now costing $6 billion a month
