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Now and Forever
By Bob Herbert
12/07/07 "New
York Times" ---
-- Most of the time we pretend it’s not there: The
staggering financial cost of the war in Iraq, which continues to
soar, unchecked, like a rocket headed toward the moon and
beyond.
Early last year, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz estimated that the “true” cost of the war would
ultimately exceed $1 trillion, and maybe even $2 trillion.
Incredibly, that estimate may have been low.
A report prepared for the Democratic majority on the Joint
Economic Committee of the House and Senate warns that without a
significant change of course in Iraq, the long-term cost of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could head into the vicinity of
$3.5 trillion. The vast majority of those expenses would be for
Iraq.
Priorities don’t get much more twisted. A country that can’t
find the money to provide health coverage for its children, or
to rebuild the city of New Orleans, or to create a first-class
public school system, is flushing whole generations worth of
cash into the bottomless pit of a failed and endless war.
“The No. 1 reason that the war in Iraq should end,” said Senator
Charles Schumer, chairman of the joint committee, “is the loss
of life that is occurring without accomplishing any of the goals
that even President Bush put forward.”
But “right below that,” he said, is the need to stop squandering
incredible amounts of money that could be put to better use —
helping to “make people’s lives better” — here at home. That
colossal and continuing waste, he said, “should cause anxiety in
anyone who cares about the future of this country. I know it
causes me anxiety.”
President Bush’s formal funding requests for Iraq have already
exceeded $600 billion. In addition to that, the report offers
estimates of the war’s “hidden costs” from its beginning to
2017: the long-term costs of treating the wounded and disabled;
interest and other costs associated with borrowing to finance
the war; the money needed to repair or replace military
equipment; the increased costs of military recruitment and
retention; and such difficult to gauge but very real costs as
the loss of productivity from those who have been killed or
wounded.
What matters more than the precision of these estimates
(Republicans are not happy with them) is the undeniable fact
that the costs associated with the Iraq war are huge and carry
with them enormous societal consequences.
Far from seeking a halt to the war, the Bush administration has
been considering a significant U.S. military presence in Iraq
that would last for many years, if not decades. There has been
very little public discussion and no thorough analysis of the
overall implications of such a policy.
What is indisputable, however, is that everything associated
with the Iraq war has cost vastly more than the administration’s
absurdly sunny forecasts. The direct appropriations are already
roughly 10 times the amount of the administration’s original
estimates of the entire cost of the war.
Senator Schumer and other Democrats on the Joint Economic
Committee have been trying (not very successfully, so far) to
get other policy makers and the public at large to focus on the
sheer insanity of pumping hundreds of billions — if not
trillions — of public dollars into a failed venture with no end
even remotely in view.
There are myriad better ways to use the many millions of dollars
that the U.S. spends on Iraq every day. Two important long-term
investments that come to mind — and that would put large numbers
of Americans to work — are the development of a serious strategy
for achieving energy independence over the next several years
and the creation of a large-scale program for rebuilding the
aging American infrastructure.
To get to those, or any number of other important initiatives,
the country’s leaders will have to somehow get past their
bizarre reluctance to end this debilitating war.
I asked Senator Schumer how soon he thought U.S. forces should
leave Iraq. He said: “You start withdrawing in three months and
be out in a year. In my view, there would be a small force left
— 10,000 or 15,000 — to deal with any Al Qaeda camps that might
be set up. But that’s it.”
His words were echoed in another context by Senator Jim Webb, a
Virginia Democrat (and also a member of the Joint Economic
Committee), who said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that “it’s
not in the strategic interest of the United States” to have a
long-term military presence in Iraq.
Youngsters who were just starting high school when the U.S.
invaded Iraq are in college now. Their children, yet unborn,
will be called on to fork over tax money to continue paying for
the war.
Seriously. How long do we want this madness to last?
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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