Getting Like Totally Wasted

It’s hard to add up the real total of direct expenditures on our Iraqi and Afghani incursions. You have to start with the actually required to pay the troops, supply the arms and support needed for the military, cover the expendables and the transportation costs, the money spend on locals – whether as bribes, construction projects, foreign aid, special projects, support for their military and governmental activities – and then add in all the military disability/death benefits, retirement and medical benefits, governmental pensions of all sorts…

Seems that however you slice it, we’ve spend over $2 trillion (all of it borrowed, since we reduced taxes as we waged war) on these boondoggles, and in my mind’s eye, we are not one whit safer and don’t have one barrel of extra oil from the effort. If anything, we have provided an active training ground for Islamist troops, provided enough collateral damage and abusive Americans to provide photographs to help recruit hundreds of thousands of anti-American combatants all over the world, and have added a huge hurdle of credibility whenever we want to serve as global negotiators of peace with third world countries.

I haven’t even addressed the losses we have faced because we didn’t invest that capital in more productive activities or the harm we have inflicted upon ourselves in excessive borrowing and building up a completely unmanageable deficit. Could a thousand 9/11 al Qaeda attacks inflict half the economic harm that such profligate spending on winless wars has inflicted upon us?

To rub salt into our puss-filled wounds, I have to add the most conservative estimates of pure unadulterated waste from the hard dollars we have spent in these distant theaters of war: “As much as $60 billion in U.S. funds has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade through lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and payoffs to warlords and insurgents, an independent panel investigating U.S. wartime spending estimates.

“In its final report to Congress, the Commission on Wartime Contracting said the figure could grow as U.S. support for reconstruction projects and programs wanes, leaving both countries to bear the long-term costs of sustaining the schools, medical clinics, barracks, roads and power plants already built with American tax dollars…The commission said calculating the exact amount lost through waste and fraud is difficult because there is no commonly accepted methodology for doing so. But using information it has gathered over the past three years, the commission said at least $31 billion has been lost and the total could be as high as $60 billion. The commission called the estimate ‘conservative.’

“Overall, the commission said spending on contracts and grants to support U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is expected to exceed $206 billion by the end of the 2011 budget year. Based on its investigation, the commission said contracting waste in Afghanistan ranged from 10 percent to 20 percent of the $206 billion total. Fraud during the same period ran between 5 percent and 9 percent of the total, the report said.” Huffington Post, August 30^th. Kinda makes you feel all warm an’ fuzzy inside, don’t it?! We should have been out of both those theaters of war… a thousand yesterdays ago.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what is it about the lessons of history that American body politic finds so completely distasteful?