The Three Trillion Dollar Squander
When we make mistakes here at ThinkingPeace, we go for HUGE. Last week we moaned about the “trillion dollars” Bush had wasted on his idiot wars. But before the pixels had even dried on the screen, Joseph Stiglitz (former chief economist at the World Bank who won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2001) released his latest analysis of US war spending and came up with an estimate of 3 trillion dollars.
Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq.
All wars, even the “good” ones, require that nations engage in significant denial of inconvenient truths. War-think simply (and mostly unconsciously) ignores anything that might blunt or lessen a nation’s resolve in the face of combat. Lies about the enemy abound, as do lies about the so-called causes leading to conflict. And when there is any public opposition to a war then lies about spending — how much and where it’s all coming from — are a given.
Even more tragic, though, are the lies of omission,, the long-term costs we never even consider: to the environment, to the families of returning soldiers, and to a range of societal problems that inevitably worsen — at increasing costs to all of us — when we spend money and resources on destruction rather than creation.
