The US has spent $1.5 trillion on war since Sept 11 attacks
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
One million seconds ago was Thursday, August 30 (11 days).
One billion seconds ago was Saturday, January 3, 1987 (31 years).
One trillion seconds ago was back during the Pleistocene geological epoch and the Paleolithic era of prehistory (31,689 years).
The quantity of American resources that have been wasted on war is shameful. For my own mental health I try not to dwell too long upon all the infrastructure, research, and social programs that money could have been better spent on.
All this money isn't being thrown into a burn pile.
It pays American soldier salaries, it buys products from American defense contractors that provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, it funds R&D that trickles down to the rest of society.
Thats more than 1 million soldier salaries and probably hundreds of thousands of jobs with companies like Boeing, Raytheon, etc.
And I know this is a generalization, and that some of our sharpest minds and highest caliber people are in the military. But I also have quite a few aquantences that really seemed to be on a bad path until they joined the military. It adds discipline and provides an outlet for agression as well as a salary for some people who would otherwise be difficult to employ. I would hazard a guess that without the military, domestic crime would go up a fair amount.
Again, this is not an endorsement of the military industrial complex, but I think that many tend to think of government waste as just total waste. When in reality, it's just a really inefficient engine of wealth distribution.
It pays soldiers to do "useless" work. These same soldiers could have been working as construction workers, teachers, factory workers, etc doing something productive. Instead, they've spent their lives killing and getting PTSD.
> it buys products from American defense contractors that provide hundreds of thousands of jobs
Once again, non-productive goods. Instead of building missiles and bullets, the resources could have been used to build new trains for example.
> it funds R&D that trickles down to the rest of society.
Don't need war for R&D. R&D money was going to be spent regardless.
It's about the opportunity costs. Money spent well vs money spent poorly.
I would say that is an assumption that is not fully true compared to knowing that war R&D has in fact produce technologies adapted in civil society. Reminds me of a false claim that if the Wright Brothers never were the first to have a successful flight, we would still have planes. We could have easily never have had a successful flight -> airplanes. Although negative, we should still give credit to war R&*D
It's just that many Brazilians simply claim that the wright brothers and those that witnessed the flight were lying.
http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_A...
Our forefathers paid a higher price.
Security and liberty are not without costs.
And Libya and Syria...
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/Overthrow--A...
^^ Not completely without bias, but probably contains a lot of inarguable historical facts that you weren't even close to being taught in high school or even college.
From my perspective, it seems that GWB created the seed that would grow into ISIS. Then it was Obama that gave it the fertile soil to grow.
I also don't understand how fighting ISIS made it worse.
But please, don't let these factors get in the way of your narrative of American exceptionalism.
Arguing that "security and liberty" (of Americans I assume, not the rest of the world) is worth "bringing peace" (read: starting wars and overthrowing democratically elected leaders) to other countries is just silly. Many millions of people were killed in the middle east (and many of them were innocent civilians). How would you act if a foreign power (acting as though they were the bringers of civilisation to a group of savages) decide to kill millions of Americans? I doubt you would think that those invaders were particularly deserving of the moral high-ground.
Could it be that these wars exposed how primitive guerrilla forces can bleed the mighty American military dry? It's not like the world has seen a very convincing show of force.
I for one worry that the bluff has been called and that every dictator in the world now knows that apart from the threat of nuclear war, the American military's capabilities are far more limited than some perhaps had thought. When relatively poor and simple battlegrounds such as Iraq or Afghanistan cause trouble one or two decades on, then what could America do against more advanced enemies or against more enemies?
This is to me the biggest worry: occupying two such relatively simple countries is a challenge. The Russians, the Chinese, Iran, heck even the tiny Syrian government, can now see that America had lots of trouble with what is currently nation No 54 and nation No 111 measured by GDP. Yes, I know that GDP does not equal military strength and that the US was officially not fighting the Afghan government. But in reality, the US was fighting primitive guerrilla forces in a primitive country. And the US didn't really come out impressing anyone with their strength.
Every dictator in the world fears an American military attack, because they will undoubtedly be overrun and dethroned. Look at how Ghadafi and Saddam tried to bend over backwards to show that they had no WMDs. American military prowess is second to none by a wide, huge margin.
A small occupying force like those allocated to Iraq/Afghanistan after the initial invasions simply can not defeat guerrilla warfare. The lack of post-invasion plans doomed these conflicts, but the initial dictators/governments had no chance of survival.
That's the reason they all now want nuclear weapons.
That's going to come with a big side order of "citation needed". To Americans? Yeah, arguably. "To the world"? Eh, there are a lot of non-Americans that might take issue. We can start with polls in Central America and the Middle East.
Apparently they weren't gentle to ethnic Chinese either, I have met many that were forced to flee in boats to avoid pogroms.
Keep in mind that yes, that required shooting up a few countries.
What matters for this however, is that it was a state sponsor and safe haven for people who'd go random places and blow economic interests up (from planes to tourist locations), located in a place where they actually had a shot at making stuff happen (ie. could have easy access to a lot of places). So Afghanistan had to go, both for it itself having to go, and to serve as a warning to other states what happens if you don't cooperate in the war on terror. The war on terror, of course, being the war to keep congress' economic interests safe.
The standard view? Pax Americana is unquestioned by American political leadership regardless of political spectrum. Of course it brought peace, wealth, and improved the world, and continues to do so, and should continue to do so. Of course American interventionism is, on average, a moral obligation and achieves moral good. And Pax Americana achieved, is still impermanent, and must constantly be renewed. And further, it cannot be questioned by international law. That is the pre-9/11 position of the vast majority of Reagnite and Bush 2 foreign policy officials, as stated in the position paper "Rebuilding America’s Defense" (2000) by the Project for a New American Century think tank, 10 out of 12 founders of which were Bush 2 administration officials. And one of those officials who is also in the current administration, John Bolton, just said yesterday, the United States will not be held accountable by the International Criminal Court. Period.
While there are data points suggesting this is more of a right wing ideology, you won't see the left wing aghast at these plainly spoken positions. They merely present a less verbally assertive version of it.
It is not at all controversial to say, American political thought is still today, insisting Pax Americana is believed in, cannot or should not be questioned, is morally good and proper, and any international institution that disagrees, is instantly discredited. I would expect a Clinton administration would be quite a lot more diplomatic about it, but the policy would be effectively the same. Clinton did vote, at the time, in favor of interventionist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And "Rebuilding America's Defense" is often cited as pretext for these wars, as it spells out Pax Americana is under threat without another Pearl Harbor-like event to motivate the American public to the cause. And then soon after 9/11 happened.
$1.5T / 320M = ~$4700 per US citizen, or ~$275 per person per year since 2001
$1.5T / 126M (number of US households in 2017) = ~$12000, or ~$700 per household per year since 2001
To me, an obvious interesting question is "If I had a choice, would I willingly pay this much for these results?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Harper
89 days at ~16 hours per day works out to ~5 seconds per number
127862 in less than one second?
The magnitudinal (?) difference going from millions to billions, being three powers of ten or (approximately) ten powers of two, is exactly the same as from billions to trillions. This works for thinking about countable stuff like populations, amounts of money, piles of grains of sand/rice, marbles and so on. Multiply by a thousand and you're good. However thinking about time periods is different, in that we rarely multiply time periods like this, or when we do we keep the units the same. Generally we don't think of large numbers of seconds as a collection of discrete things.
From your example, people tend to think about '11 days' vs. '11 000 days' or'31 years' vs. '31 000 years' and easily grasp the difference in size. With a bit of practice (and a fondness for Vernor Vinge) it's true that you could gain an intuitive feel for kiloseconds (around 15 minutes) and Megaseconds (around 11 days) although you would have to put up with the strange looks and constant requests for clarification...
My point is, using time intervals separated by the orders of magnitude in question is a poor way to get a feel for what billions and trillions of things (e.g. dollars spent on war) and you would be better off thinking about what a billion dollars might get you.
In fact, at USD 200 million each, it gets you five brand new Boeing 767-300ER jets. So, now thinking about the 1.5 trillion from the OP, that gives 7 500 of them. If you split up all the people alive in the world today into groups of one million, each group could have its very own 767. There would be eleven for Belgium and about three for Wales, the traditional country-sized units. Alternatively you could build two Shards[0] for a billion, and three thousand for one war. If you built all of those in Belgium, you'd probably annoy people, though.
If you prefer, you could convert it all to Gummi Bears! They are about USD 0.01 in bulk, and weigh about 2.5g each. So a billion dollars worth of them would weigh 250 000 tonnes, about equivalent to the gross tonnage of an oil tanker like the Globtik Tokyo[1] which was the largest supertanker in the world when launched in 1972. Our war equivalent in Gummi Bears is 250 million tonnes, for which the obvious object for comparison is the Great Pyramid of Giza[2] so the sweets would weigh the same as about forty pyramids.
I forget what my point was, now...
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globtik_Tokyo
2. https://sciencing.com/much-did-pyramids-weigh-7499289.html
For reference, Jeff Bezos is currently worth about $20 billion more than the next person on the list of billionaires. This means that he could solve US homelessness himself and still be the richest person in human history. The US military budget increase (which is a ridiculous thing to say given how ridiculously over-funded the US military is already) was $82 billion. You could solve world poverty almost three times over with just how much the budget was increased from 2017. (Note that many Democrats as well as Republicans happily voted for these increases.)
EDIT: Here's the source I found for the above $20 billion-per-year figure[1] -- to be honest I'm not quite convinced (I heard this elsewhere and I incorrectly assumed it was a more solid figure). So I might be repeating misinformation, and I'll stop doing it. I found a figure for solving extreme poverty but it's higher (~$100 billion per year for 20 years)[2]. For the $30 billion figure, a 2008 article claimed that only $30 billion per year is required to restart programs to solve world hunger[2].
The reason why I thought $20 billion per year might be reasonable is because I assumed it would be part of some kind of rehabilitation plan.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/us/homeless-rates-steady-... [3]: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2008/1000853/index.html
Social Security was designed to reduce senior poverty (it did work), but spends > $900 billion every year to continue working.
No you cannot spend $20 billion and solve homelessness or poverty. You probably can't even make a double digit % dent in homelessness or poverty for a single year with $20 billion, even with 100.0% efficiency of payout.
Statements like that totally mis-characterize the kind of problems you are putting on our intellectual plates. They aren't point problems like a leak in a gas line. In fact, they're closer to, ironically, a complex series of conflicts in the middle east...
Solving poverty altogether is out of the question with only $20 billion to work with, but since you mentioned homelessness - if we assume there are 1.5 million homeless in the United States, $20 billion would provide $1,100 per month per homeless individual for a year. (Assuming 100% efficiency of payout)
What am I missing in this consideration?
(Also worth mentioning that a Housing and Urban Development official, in 2012, estimated the cost to end homelessness at $20 billion.)
If you give $2000 a month to every homeless person in say, San Francisco or Dallas or Smalleville, Nebraska:
* How many of them can afford an apartment with it?
* How many landlords will sign them? After all you are giving them money, not proof of income, and landlords are often particular about who they rent to.
* How many of them will decline to look for shelter with the money?
My point is that economic considerations like this often under-estimate the amount of footwork needed to make money actually useful. You would need to do a lot more than give them rent money, you'd need to move them to lower-rent places, find landlords that would rent to them, or spend considerable resources trying to convince them to even do anything with the money that involved housing.
Programs like medicaid are costly because they provide more than just money or medicine; they provide case workers and associated footwork—and those things are needed. There’s a much higher no-show rate among medicaid patients than other cohorts. They don’t sign up, they’re afraid of doctors, they don’t have addresses, and so on.
The problems some groups face are deeper than others, and helping those groups may require difficult and not-very-efficient overhead. It’s overhead that is still worth going through to become a better functioning society! But for a statement like "$20 billion can cure homelessness" to be correct, you'd have to believe its not necessary. This kind of work (what medicaid and medicare workers are doing every day for example) is very, very necessary, if you wanted to make a dent in the homelessness population.
That is what you are missing in the dollar figure consideration. Why they are homeless, where they are homeless, and the extent, which goes well beyond renting a flat, of what it takes to make a homeless person non-homeless.
$1100 will buy you cheap rent and basic food. It will not buy you the ability to put our homeless into those houses or to run the kitchens to feed them. If you give it as direct subsidy, the money will go straight into the hands of drug lords. If you administer it, you will spend 50% more than that on just the administration costs of tracking down the homeless and offering them services.
The marginal value of a dollar decreases substantially as you give something more funding. We already have shelters and programs - they're ineffective at keeping people off the streets long term. Adding more shelters until there's always large quantities of empty beds will not help. Well meaning though it may be, it's giving a man a fish, one who doesn't want to be taught.
I don't even see how $30 billion could solve poverty in the U.S. Think about it, if that was true, what the hell are we wasting all the this money on social services? Apparently all it would take is $30 billion. We spend almost a trillion a year in social services, and yet you think another $30 billion is all it would take to solve poverty?
So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."[0]
-Osama bin Laden
[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16990-2004Nov...
My rule of thumb to explain things is "follow the money". Several industries have handsomly profited over this situation, but don't believe anybody else gained from that: not us Americans as a whole, certainly not those who had to deal with war in their own place.
Engineering Departments get large portions of their revenues through Defense programs. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory made 27% of their revenue (roughly a billion dollars) in 2016. That's one research center.
Do you have an engineering degree? Were your facilities nice? Might want to follow the money with that.
NASA (really NACA) wouldn’t exist today if the Soviets hadn’t launched Sputnik. Competition and fear spur quite a bit of innovation and public reason for funding research projects.
Convincing large amounts of people to give you money without reason doesn’t usually work. War is easy to sell, people can conceptualize the risk easily. I’d argue you’d see more funding and research for preventing climate change if it were as easy to conceptualize risk wise for the general public.
There was plenty of stupid political infighting, but nothing like the division caused by the invasion of Iraq.
Thank God there's none of that happening.
There is plenty of patriotism drummed up buts it’s all shallow. Support the troops has more to do with letting your government send them to die wherever they want and less about concern for them.
And for Bin Laden that war was probably center of his universe. For the USSR it might have been kind of a big deal, but probably not the only issue they were dealing with worldwide and domestically. Bin Laden was probably never that concerned with representing that accurately, you know, because who's going to set him straight?
When I think about that increase it hurts to remember that when Bernie Sanders proposed free college for everyone people said the $60-70 billion price tag was too high. Where would we get the money? Then no one blinked when we increased defense spending by an even greater amount.
- American flags flying everywhere.
- Bumper stickers everywhere.
- Americans demanding that "something be done" everywhere.
- Nonstop media barrage favoring both wars.
- Utter lack of skepticism and rush to believe whatever was being put out by the Administration.
- Unshakable faith that the military would make everything right.
As a dissenter, I was afraid to voice my opinions (retribution, being labeled a traitor) and felt utterly helpless to change anything about the direction things were headed.
It's one thing to look back and wonder how we ended up in such a mess. It's another thing to see the conviction on the faces of nearly every person you talk with that the war would be over within a few weeks and a military response was the right course.
From what I've read about the early history of US involvement in Vietnam, my experience is far from unique. That part about the war being over within a few weeks in particular seems to repeat itself with disturbing regularity: the Civil War, WWI, Vietnam, Gulf Wars, Afghanistan.
All of which was probably according to plan (or even better than expected) as far as Bin Laden was concerned.
More importantly, I like to think other countries would have signed on to something constructive quickly as well. Wasted opportunity.
Personal anecdote:
I was in a tiny town in Portugal during 9/11. In the following days, I read all of the available papers and saw that even China was ready to share intel with the USA. Random Portuguese people offered me a place to stay while my country was "a war zone." The outpouring of global support was unprecedented.
Meanwhile, I called my younger brother who was normally well informed, was attending a very liberal university, and yet was worried about ME! All he knew about was all of "the anti-American sentiment" around the world. That was the day I truly understood the power of the reactionary idiocy of US media.
The USA could have used 9/11 to really start A New American Century, but the morons in charge were truly just morons. They were all part of a think tank named The Project for a New American Century, yet they let that opportunity pass them by. This was the moment that I understood the idiocy of neo-cons.
When future historians analyze the end of the American era, this will truly be the turning point.
Note: I have been careful to avoid being political on HN, but this topic deserves no less. I will never forget.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.globalresearch.ca/we-re-goi...
Of course [0], promulgating that feeling of the "average person" is precisely one of the ways propaganda works.
[0] in retrospect for me personally.
This is the cause of your top 3 points. When the propaganda machine is going full force, it's hard be the dissenting voice. When the editorial board of the washingtonpost says that there is "irrefutable" evidence of iraqi wmd and their involvement in 9/11, it's hard for skeptics and honest people to respond without being attacked. After all, the washingpost is one of the papers of record. They certainly wouldn't lie ( or so we are told ).
>- Utter lack of skepticism and rush to believe whatever was being put out by the Administration.
There were skeptics. The "news" ( both the left and the right ) branded them traitors. Hell an entire nation and our oldest ally ( france ) was mercilessly caricatured and attacked. ( Remember freedom fries and surrender monkeys )?
It's standard practice. The media riles up the public, silences the opposition and off we go to another illegal war. We fall for it every single time.
Also worth noting most of the Democratic Party supported the Iraq invasion, as did the New York Times. The "establishment" was firmly behind that war until it started to fail.
"Maintaining an army to defend the border of the Empire from barbarian attacks was a constant drain on the government. Military spending left few resources for other vital activities, such as providing public housing and maintaining quality roads and aqueducts. Frustrated Romans lost their desire to defend the Empire. The empire had to begin hiring soldiers recruited from the unemployed city mobs or worse from foreign counties. Such an army was not only unreliable, but very expensive. The emperors were forced to raise taxes frequently which in turn led again to increased inflation." Source: https://www.rome.info/history/empire/fall/
I'm just an outsider in this matter, but it looks a lot like the US is spending money on offensive wars that it elects to engage in, rather than having to protect its borders from "the barbarians". So I don't really see the strong parallel.
Basically the US cut a deal with the Saudis decades ago "price your oil only in US dollars and we'll support your monarchy". Bottom line is that any industrial nation that needs energy must hold US dollars to purchase oil, which vastly inflates global demand for dollars, artificially supporting our currency and also essentially acting as a tax on the global economy. US hegemony is essentially reliant on the US military keeping everyone else in line with regards to oil pricing as well as central banking. Consider:
Saddam Hussein ditched USD for EUR in 2000 ( https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeur... ). Deposed in 2003.
Iran opened a non-dollar-denominated oil burse in 2008. Promptly sanctioned and eventually cut off from the SWIFT banking system. ( https://apjjf.org/-China-Hand-/2719/article.html ) Invasion was discussed. Remember McCain's "Bomb bomb Iran" moment? But the US military was already overstretched and in no position to crack open Iran (a MUCH tougher nut than Iraq or Afghanistan).
Qaddafi wanted to create a new pan-African currency, starting in Libya with gold/oil-backed dinars. Deposed in 2011. ( https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/06/new-hillary-... )
Some websites have argued that after Ukraine's revolution all their gold reserves disappeared as well, possibly into US/European hands. I haven't found super-reliable data on that though.
Point is, these are the borders of the empire, one that is maintained by the global distribution of US military might, as well as international organizations such as the IMF. Before anyone can posit solutions to American's bank-busting spending on the military-industrial complex, you must first understand the hidden context of what really motivates American actions on the world stage.
If you want to call the US an empire, Canada and Mexico would probably be considered part of the empire as would anywhere else that NATO or US corporations have large amounts of influence. The "barbarians"[1] would be those that actively avoid US influence like China, Russia and parts of the Middle East.
[1] An unfair term, but it was also unfair when used by the Romans, so it is reasonable to use in this analogy
Roman soldiers by contrast were paid in real money with value based on the inherent value of the materials it was made of. That also meant that the governments were also forced to give heed to the cost of their actions. And so needless wars or other expenses could and did destroy nations. But now money means nothing and can be created out of thin air. Its only value is in other countries agreeing to see it as valuable. So long as the USD guarantees access to oil (... an important factor many forget when thinking about our real motivations in the mideast), and we have a strong enough military and political influence to 'encourage' the persistence of the USD as the world reserve currency, it is basically impossible for our country to go bankrupt. And I do not see this as a good thing, as it also means there's absolutely no fiscal deterrence to reckless spending, and war is incredibly expensive.
As you say, money can be created out of thin air. The money that the USA spend in a moment in time is limited by the real resources available (overspending would create inflation) [1].
The 'national debt' in only a number reflecting pass spending and has very little relevance. The USA dollar as the currency of 'the empire' have a special status, but that it's not what protect the USA of default, but the strength of the real economy and being the issuer of their own currency.
1) Central banks do have the ability to control monetary supply. This is exactly what quantitative easing is -- the fed purchasing securities with funny money to drive the price of things up and spur artificial inflation and call the resultant increase in market prices 'growth.' That article was written before we started going far off the deep end with monetary policy.
2) Modern monetary policy is based around faith. If people have faith in a currency, it has value. When that faith wavers, the currency is worth less than the paper its printed on. As an amusing (but not necessarily relevant) aside that's already the case in the US coinage, where we've had to pass laws prohibiting the melting of coins as the metal is now in many cases worth more than the amount of money they're supposed to represent! The entire purpose of pretending the money has intrinsic value is not some holdover from the gold era, but to try to convince everybody the money has intrinsic value.
---
The real reason the USD has remained so powerful is because it guarantees access to oil and oil remains the most valued resource in existence. And so holding onto USD ensures you have are indirectly holding onto access to oil, which has value everywhere. Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Syria -- these nations all have one thing in common. They expressed intent to no longer peg their oil prices on the dollar and to start trading primarily in different currencies. Haven't you ever wondered how arbitrary our Mideast relations must seem until you consider this? Or why we 'waste' trillions of dollars to no apparent end in these nations?
Because what we're doing in the Mideast is very much intentional. We're best buds with Saudi Arabia - one of the most oppressive regimes in existence and a huge sponsor, and source, of terror. For instance 15 of the 19 hijackers in 9/11 were Saudi. But all that matters is that Saudi Arabia plays its role of an obedient lapdog when it comes to the petrodollar - so we're best friends forever. If they ever indicated genuine plans to move away from the USD, expect for us to suddenly realize they're not a great country and urgently decide we need to 'bring democracy' to them.
My question is, now that we're here, what do we do now? Pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan seems, irresponsible to say the least. Certainly surrending the whole country of Afghanistan back to the Taliban would be an incredible blemish, and no citizen of another nation would ever risk their lives to help a nation who so callously discarded those who did the same.
And certainly abandoning the Kurds in Iraq would be another tragedy, as well as opening up that nation to another horrific power vacuum situation.
And that's the lower bound of what we could do. We could unilaterally pull out our forces from all over the world, abandoning our commitments to the incredibly succesful NATO and to other allies including Israel, Japan, and S. Korea.
I'm not a big fan of prolonged war. I think Afghanistan was more justified than the incredible shit show that was Iraq. I think the Taliban and Isis and Assad (where the US gets criticized both for not doing enough and doing too much) and Hussein are horrific people and entities.
But these articles, while important for highlighting the incredible drain on national treasure we've subjected ourselves to seem to me to avoid very important questions about where to go from here and instead just assign a number to matters of geopolitics which affect billions of lives the world over.
Of course, as geopolitics is such an incredibly vast and complicated topic perhaps that is beyond the scope of these stories.
Still... where do we go from here?
That's the logic I'm sure the US had during the Vietnam War, and it proved to be flawed then. Especially interesting given that less than 50 years later we are improving our diplomatic and even military relationship with Vietnam due to our mutual adversary: China.
"I think the Taliban and Isis and Assad (where the US gets criticized both for not doing enough and doing too much) and Hussein are horrific people and entities."
Curious how Assad gets lumped in with those. In 2010 Syria had one of the highest levels of development in the region (much like Qaddafi's Libya). I've been following the Syrian Civil War from a number of sources since its inception. The level of brutality he employs is pretty moderate for the region, magnitudes lower than ISIS/Taliban (with their mass executions, beheadings, enslavement and rape, etc...) or Saddam Hussein (https://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ ). As for where do we go from here, you first need to understand the larger strategic implications of WHAT/WHY the US does what it does. For that, see my other response in this thread.
Well, you don't have any power to actually decide any of those things. So, first you need to get that power. After that I'm sure you'll figure out what to do with all that war machine surveillance police state and how to turn it into something humane. But for now all the "we" talk is just giving in to and spreading government propaganda.
The low number of U.S. causalities keep outrage to a minimum. Lots of people probably don't even know someone who's been wounded in combat, let alone killed.
The monetary cost is just invisible, it's not like a lot of citizens are really tracking the budget. Those who don't, but claim to care about the national debt will usually go after social programs first because the idea of welfare queens and people they just don't like using social programs is magnified into a serious huge problem that if we could just solve that we could afford everything else easily...
It's the equivalent of screaming about someone dropping a penny but lighting a %100 bill on fire to get everyone's attention for the tirade.
And while many U.S. citizens know the U.S. has a large and powerful military I don't think they really have the idea of the scale it really is compared to the rest of the world. At which point I like to point out that there's 20 active aircraft carriers in the world, the U.S. operates 10. We also operate 10 escort carriers that are smaller, but still larger than half the other aircraft carriers operated by other countries. Just as a single example. And it's not like we've just run amok only with aircraft carriers.
For one, even if you take the 6tn total cost for these two wars you're talking about 330bn a year for 17 years. A staggering sum to be certain, but the USG's expenditures measure in the trillions annually.
For another, our immense military has almost certainly prevented regional conflicts (say Saudi Arabia vs Iran, China vs the rest of the South Pacific) and has allowed other nations to bring up their economies without having to worry about military spending (Japan, Germany).
The net positives from a more peaceful world are very hard to measure but a lot of it is having such a large dog in the fight.
More equality of armies means more regional conflicts.
Finally as a measure of GDP US military expenditures are still less than several countries.
You can point to our many follies because of course you can, that's simple and easy, and I'm not trying to defend them. But to say we've run amok would imply that they've done no good and I don't believe that to be the case.
Like it or not under US hegemony the world's been safer and more prosperous than its ever been and a tremendous number of people have been lifted out of poverty globally.
Is that all because of US hegemony? Maybe not but I'd be hard pressed to see a clear argument for why the world's defining super power would not have had some measurable role in the fulfillment of those measures.
If we were to have war taxes, directly paying for active wars, I think it would be quite a different story. But Americans who vote have gotten exactly what they asked for (in the aggregate): wars they do not have to pay for, wars they do not have to volunteer to fight. It's hired out to others, with borrowed money, doesn't affect me.
Understand, this is perhaps a bizarre defense of the stereotypically ignorant average American, that American foreign policy does not directly affect Americans. The U.S. government has a longer reach and effect globally, than domestically. And most Americans don't know what that looks like.
This is the huge elephant in the room.
The USA needs a large jobs program and a massive amount of education funding, especially for rural youth who do not either study a trade or go to college immediately after high school.
Providing these things directly with no strings -- or even as compensation for civilian service -- is wildly unpopular. The military is an absolutely massive back-door social program.
Hussein was terrible but we bungled the rebuilding of Iraq when we had total control and created the environment that made ISIS possible - we broke it, we owned it and we still fracked it up and have ended up giving Iran an almost client state right next door.
The borders of both Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be both artificial constructs that are proving impossible for us to build a nation around, the Iraqi Kurd's have done a much better job administering themselves and deserve the opportunity (the problem there is a.) local oil and Iraq's central government b.) Turkey a NATO ally opposing any Kurdish national state).
That is a decently likely outcome. For-profit privatized outsourced permanent war, paid for presumably by exploiting the mineral wealth of Afghanistan.
However it got corrupted by America's preference for capitalist unfree societies over socialist or other democratic societies; everything from the bombing of Cambodia to the murder of Allende. It's also been undermined by a failure to recognise equal rights and freedoms for communities within America.
A good place to start would be to ratify the convention on Rights of the Child and re-join the International Criminal Court. The US is basically the single outlier on these and there's no good reason not to.
Still a hell of a lot more than the official number.
The funny thing is that many Americans are perfectly happy with this... but if you bring up, say, universal healthcare they rage against the very idea of the government spending so much money.
You're over-simplifying the healthcare issue. It's not just about money. It's about individual rights and responsibility of the government.
We spend $900M a day on war. Lets fund our medicare instead.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest...
https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/8c92ccc...
https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/ea01efb...
"The $900M goes to vocational training, employment, and cutting-edge equipment for a large slice of physically-fit working age Americans. The $1500M predominantly goes to squeezing an additional 6 months of life expectancy out of retirees and the disabled."
So which of those is really adding more value to the nation?
Meanwhile, we've also normalized the most horrid perversions of our democracy, our values, and the rule of law at home. We've grown comfortable with indefinite detention. We had a hot and heavy flirtation with systematized torture. We've created monsters like ICE and the DHS who are given ridiculous powers in a "border zone" that includes 2/3 of the entire US population.
All in all, I don't think history will be kind in its assessment of our reaction to the September 11th attacks.
To end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years, Sachs calculated that the total cost per year would be about $175 billion. This represents less than one percent of the combined income of the richest countries in the world.
It's worth noting that ending extreme poverty is only part of ending world poverty. We're talking about ensuring people have at least $1.90/day to live on. You get a lot of bang for your buck helping people below that line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...
Something tells me that the welfare safety net has more societal benefits than a wage floor, but right now we don't really have a respectable form of either compared to 20 years ago.
1. Most American/European (with a few exceptions [1]) only focus on the spending cost of their own countries but less concern about the cost of the nations that the wars involved. i.e. Iraq, Libya, etc. Breaking an exiting stable eco systems have huge impact on local people. In Iraq, 200k - 600k direct or indirect death. It translated to 2 million - 6 million American if we put population into account. In Libya with a chaos satiation waves of illegal immigrants have a chance to go to Europa from the country , which changed the political scenery of many Eurapean countries. Again the cost is not counted into the war.
2.Perception defect of modern human let the war criminals being defined to only those who kill innocent people. For example Hitler is considered to be responsible for deaths of millions so he is a war criminal. This is visible to modern human mind. But most Iraqi deaths were not caused by US bombing but their killing with each other or indirect slow deaths by some other reasons , say sudden disrupt of power in a hospital. Not many modern human being consider US is responsible. I would praised the old Bush stopping the first gulf war to let Saddam survive and avoid unpredictable risk of destroying stable eco system which has worse result that more distributed deaths happen with no visible war criminals
3.(Omitted) Sorry, will be down voted so just to be brief: Assange said "Journalists are war criminals". I didn’t understand the meaning initially. But seeing so many comments here being down voted because they are not aligned with public belief, I realize that how easily the mass population can be fooled. The reason that Journalists can fool public opinion is they really report truth but only when things can be verified. Otherwise they are very likely just selling their beliefs and some time they fabricate stories to support their beliefs.
Nobody seems to care. I guess its because, without that spending, America would be a third-world country by now.
EDIT: you can't discuss America's illegal wars from the perspective of the innocent victims. This will get you downvotes - nobody likes to think of their military as anything less than 100% honourable and invulnerable to such error. Nobody wants to know about the maimed kids and utterly evil destruction of civilisation at the hands of America's Thug Warrior Class... You can't discuss America's illegal wars from the perspective of the cost to Americans - nobody likes to think what those $Trillions could have done, to improve American society - and there is much it could have done (e.g. Healthcare, Skid Row, colony on Mars, etc.). So, how can we get Americans to see the idiocy of their military-industrial-pharmaceutical-complex? What methods, perhaps extreme, might gain their decadent attention to the issue of their out of control state? One wonders ..
Does that help you understand the situation?
Now take it a step further. Imagine if instead of paying all those people to do nothing, you paid them to do useful jobs that actually help the world instead of attacking it. We could all be so much better off than we are now.
But less pendantically, The US would probably be stronger economically, long term, if it phased out much of its war spending and focused it instead on infrastructure, education, healthcare, and R&D.
Unfortunately, in the United States, our politicians like to frame non-military spending as some sort of luxury... its all butter, bread, and circus even if its providing boring but essential services to American citizens.
Care to explain how this is true?
Its poor uneducated thug classes, currently serving in the military, need something worthwhile to justify their existence and continued participation in what can, in all fairness, be described as a Death Cult.