There was a small news item Thursday in The Wall Street Journal which showed how much the war in Iraq (not terror nor does it include numbers for Afghanistan just Iraq) actually costs per month.
$8.4 billion a month. That's about twice as much as previously estimated. I thought it was a pile of dog shit at half that price. Now I really think it's a waste.
Do the math and $8.4 billion comes down to about $280 million a day, and pardon my pessimism and all the claims of media this and media that and the bullshit about good news coming out of the war zone, but that's $280 million a day for a losing proposition.
Even venture capitalists in the late 1990s who were throwing millions at b-plans that included e-Toasters that could e-mail you when your toast was ready in the morning would blanch at those figures.
By no means am I anti-war, or a peacenik. And I don't really care how many Iraqis die over there (it's reportedly about 35,000 vs. our 3,000 for the number crunchers out there) but what I am is a realist.
We need to win or leave. Leaving really isn't a smooth option. The region will decay even further, and all the blood feuds we've started over there will only come via jetplane to our own shores. To me that's out.
Whatever form victory takes then let's get on with it.
Merciless force is generally the quick way to win wars, according to guys like George Patton, Bull Halsey, Chester Nimitz, Lord Nelson, Doug MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Colin Powell, George Washington and even Julius Caesar. Dogpile the bastards over there with unrestricted warfare. Then they'll be gone. A few eggs will be broken for sure, people will complain, but in 18-24 months the thing will be over.
Half measures only invites defeat and more enemies.
But back to my taxdollars: $8.4 billion a month is about 7 times the $1.3 billion the Food and Drug Administration gets yearly to make sure our meat and Tylenol isn't poisoned.
The Department of Defense gets about $540 billion a year to pay for their planes, trains, automobiles, tanks, ships and cool submarines.
The Environmental Protection Agency has a yearly outlay of $7 billion (still $1.4 billion short of the war costs a month to match) to make sure we breathe clean air and drink clean water.
The Housing and Urban Development agency gets around $36 billion a year to do cool things like try and help people buy homes so they can be productive members of society and be proud of their lives (yes it is riddled with corruption and other problems and what bank or mortgage company isn't)
It takes $17 billion to run NASA a year and they show pretty pictures of the solar system and give us neat things like computers, advanced medicines and Teflon.
If these seem like the wimpy parts of government, I've chosen them in part because they piss off the useless frat boys in our society but also because they actually give back to America. Who wants to die when they pop a coupe of Advil or wants to drink shit filled water or wants their bacon sticking to their pans in the morning? Not I.
What in hell is Iraq going to put on my table? Is the war in Iraq going to help put my son through college, without the prospect of him losing a leg?
I don't see anything of value there, and I've been to that part of the world. We should never have gotten wrapped up in this invasion, but now that we are there, we need to get on with winning it and finding a way to exploit that part of the world for America's (and my) betterment.
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