Reply #58: CASUALTY OF WAR: THE U.S. ECONOMY [View All]

[54anickel]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/17/MNG5GDPEK31.DTL

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost taxpayers $314 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office projects additional expenses of perhaps $450 billion over the next 10 years.

That could make the combined campaigns, especially the war in Iraq, the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years, causing even some conservative experts to criticize the open-ended commitment to an elusive goal. The concern is that the soaring costs, given little weight before now, could play a growing role in U.S. strategic decisions because of the fiscal impact.

"Osama (bin Laden) doesn't have to win; he will just bleed us to death," said Michael Scheuer, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA who led the pursuit of bin Laden and recently retired after writing two books critical of the Clinton and Bush administrations. "He's well on his way to doing it."

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Put simply, critics say, the war is not making the United States safer and is harming U.S. taxpayers by saddling them with an enormous debt burden, since the war is being financed with deficit spending.

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The objective has always been to install a friendly government," said Charles V. Peña, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, a libertarian think tank. "Are the costs worth that? No, because it's not something we can accomplish for the long term. It's just going to continue to drain the American taxpayer. I don't see how it's going to get better. It's only going to get worse."

James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow for national security and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, which supports the president on most matters, warned that the war's costs would only rise because of the growing need to repair and replace battered military equipment, from helicopters to Humvees. In addition, the rising death toll is making it harder for the military to recruit new soldiers, and long deployments are hurting the morale of National Guard and reserve units sent to Iraq.

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