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Comment by rootsudo | Hacker News Reader

This is a good thing by the Trump administration. I wish it had more attention during the election.

"Trump, who campaigned in 2016 on stopping “ridiculous endless wars” in the Middle East, took to Twitter last month to announce that American forces currently serving in Afghanistan will be home by Christmas."

Imagine all that money, used instead on our infrastructure instead of propping up wars and enemy of west news broadcasts for the past 19 years.

"The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1.57 trillion since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a Defense Department report."

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It’s much higher than 1.57 trillion. Most studies put it over 5 trillion. This one puts it at 6.4 trillion last November.

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/

Makes sense, but I referenced the article and it was quoted there in one of the first bullet points as the amount I quoted.

Much of that money was borrowed.

Still, that alternate universe where we didn’t waste money on two wars of occupation on the other side of the world, didn’t bail out loads of banks and large corporations during the financial crisis and weren’t actively looking to spend more money on unnecessary crap, with the top notch infrastructure minus the enormous cost overruns and CEQA and CEQA-like review processes of the past 20 years, must be pretty nice. Maybe they even kept their Nuclear Arsenal up to date, didn’t kill the F-22 and kept their medical stockpiles in stock and in good condition.

> Much of that money was borrowed.

I'm not seeing how that is relevant. There are boots on the ground & bombs in the air. Someone is fronting real resources. There is no possible return on these resources. In fact, the return is negative since the US is taking fairly normal Middle Easterners and presumably making enemies for life.

A situation has been set up that is even worse than borrowing resources to support an unproductive and unsustainable lifestyle. This is borrowing resources to ruin random strangers lives. Those resources could have been used for any inane project and literally everyone is better off.

I’m arguing that not borrowing and spending money on two foreign wars of occupation does not automatically lend itself to permission for borrowing and spending money on something else instead.

I think we are basically in agreement otherwise, unless you want to argue the details.

Does it really require an outsider to execute something like this? Most politicians and the military industrial complex take us for a ride it seems.

Pulling out most forces from Afghanistan and Iraq has been tried several times already. It’s how Islamic State managed to establish themselves in the first place. The last pullout from northern Syria apart from betraying the Kurds also allowed hundreds of hardcore IS prisoners to just walk free. So far it’s been counterproductive, but here’s hoping.

One could make the claim that 20 years of US involvement in the Mideast has created unstable power structures that requires perpetual military support to maintain. There’s no guarantee that N more years of additional military involvement will stabilize this power dynamic.

> It’s how Islamic State managed to establish themselves in the first place.

No that was widely credited to the power vacuum created by the United States of America when they publicly hanged the President of Iraq for all the Muslim world to see. [1][2][3]

Serious error of judgement by White House royalty trying to make their ancestors proud. The US gave the Taliban a decade of training, funding and weapons.[4][5][6][7] They gave ISIS the perfect environment for them to grow big and everyone knows it.

It doesn't matter what business you are in, everyone is always trying to create more work for themselves, the military and intelligence services are no exception.

[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/americas-failed-strategy-middl...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/23/...

[3] https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/iraqs-power-vacuum-cou...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

> described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency."

[5] https://theintercept.com/2019/08/21/taliban-peace-talks-afgh...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA%E2%80%93al-Qaeda_controver...

[7] https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/who...

It got the attention it deserved. He had 4 years and a tweet right before the next election means nothing. Especially with this president. It also didn't get much press that Trump said he was about to release his tax returns.

That’s fair as long as we also talk about the constant campaigning for increased military spending and the number of defense industry lobbyists in the administration or why the Secretary of Defense position is empty in the first place.

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