Much to my (and I hope many others’) chagrin and disappointment, President Obama has indicated he will be sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Prior to the announcement, the Obama administration’s fiscal 2010 budget for the Pentagon, released in May, asked for $65 billion for Afghanistan and $61 billion for Iraq. According to the Wall Street Journal, the additional 30,000 troops would cost an additional $15-30 Billion a year. This means that the total war budget—exclusive of weapons development and military operations outside of the war zones—for 2010 will be between $140 and $155 Billion. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost the United States taxpayers close to $1 Trillion dollars.
Of course, the insanity of this is staggering on many levels not the least being the most basic one: you can’t eradicate terrorism or the possibility of terrorism no matter how many troops you send over to Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorist groups can form at any time in any place if there are people who have the will to action—the Oklahoma Federal Building was destroyed by American terrorists. If we kill all of the current generation of adults who might commit acts of terrorism (unlikely no matter how much we spend or how many troops we send over) , there are still future generations who can grow up to become terrorists either in Afghanistan and Iraq or other countries where we’re not presently engaged in military action. And, in fact, there are empirical studies that show that by killing many Iraqis and Afghans, we are actually increasing the likelihood of terrorist groups forming and doing violence to United States citizens.
Moreover, the country that has shown the greatest ideological/religious hostility towards the U.S. is Saudi Arabia—but for many reasons (virtually all economic), we don’t even try to wage war against militant Wahabi sect members, despite the majority of the terrorists who caused the tragedies of 9/11 being Saudis and the architects of this attack being Saudis.
And, if as I (and many others) suspect, that the real and most obvious reason for the U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has to do with the control of oil and natural gas resources, why is it that, since the war began, the price of oil has actually risen and that oil companies have made record profits?
But even if the buildup of troops and the war itself actually made sense, there is still the issue of the U.S. economy and the impact of the downturn on our citizens. How can we or the government (in prior years, I might have been tempted to write ‘OUR’ government, but the government is no longer OF the people, BY the people, or FOR the people—it’s of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation), in good conscience, spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year waging a war when 1 in 6 of our own citizens are either starving or are chronically malnourished? Is the threat of a bomb being detonated worse than almost 17 million children going to bed hungry every night, not to mention the 50,000,000 Americans who can’t afford proper health care?
This is an increase of 36 percent over the numbers released one year by the USDA, which found that 36.2 million American were at risk of hunger.“It is tragic that so many people in this nation of plenty don’t have access to adequate amounts of nutritious food,” said Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America. “Although these new numbers are staggering, it should be noted that these numbers reflect the state of the nation one year ago, in 2008. Since then, the economy has significantly weakened, and there are likely many more people struggling with hunger than this report states.
We need to let the politicians (again, not OUR politicians because they don’t work for us—they work for Wall Street, the HMOs, and for the Oil Companies) know that this is ridiculous and unconscionable—the richest country in the world shouldn’t tolerate around 1/6th of its population being chronically malnourished.