Jack A. Smith: The True Cost Of America's Wars

During his speech on Afghanistan June 22, President Obama revealed that "Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war". Of course, he knew this to be a deceptive under-statement, to satisfy the morons who voted for him. However, few Americans have closely followed Washington's 21st century "wars of choice", so a trillion probably "sounds right" to them, but that amount in ten years, when the annual cost of air conditioning alone for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq amounts to $20.2 billion a year, is way off base! It's difficult to conceive of one trillion, so here it is: Sixty seconds is one minute. One million seconds comprises about 11.5 days, and a billion seconds is 32 years, but a trillion seconds is 32,000 years. The latest objective estimate for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, made public June 29, is between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion (140,000 years), according to the research project "Costs of War" by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. The university assembled a team of economists, legal experts, political scientists, anthropologists, and a physician (probably for those who had passed out during the gruesome experiment). As they found out, the medical costs are "huge"! While we know that just over 6,000 US soldiers have died in our many wars, it is startling that we do not know much about the levels of injury, nor do these figures include the thousands of deaths and injuries among civilian contractors. There are about as many contractors as troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, $400 billion of our tax money went toward paying off past war debts as far back as the Korean War of the early 1950's. Our country will be paying war debts indefinitely, because Washington is always borrowing to plan for, or start NEW wars!!