Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.
I ran across a site Saturday that was really sobering on what the big numbers being spent to fight a war across the ocean mean.
Wanna know how much war costs?
That’s my money at work. As always, my official position on the Iraq war is “I’m ambivalent about it”. I’m in favor in some ways, and opposed in other ways. I support our soldiers and goals, but not necessarily our methods. It’s the sort of position some people call “straddling the fence”, and isn’t always comfortable.
I ran across a site Saturday that was really sobering on what the big numbers being spent to fight a war across the ocean mean.
Wanna know how much war costs?
That’s my money at work. As always, my official position on the Iraq war is “I’m ambivalent about it”. I’m in favor in some ways, and opposed in other ways. I support our soldiers and goals, but not necessarily our methods. It’s the sort of position some people call “straddling the fence”, and isn’t always comfortable.
Comments are closed.
Methods
Well, I certainly would prefer a world without war. I sympathize with the families of soldiers on both sides, US and Iraqi.. its is a horror, and of that there can be no doubt.
However, our budget is significantly inflated by our rebuilding efforts, our use of non lethal force, and our continual moves to keep troop morale high. It would be significantly cheaper to carpetbomb iraq until all insugency stops, then take off and let the rest of the world pick up the pieces. It would be significantly cheaper to not rotate troops, to kill all enemies as opposed to capturing and holding them, to beat the country into submission with a war of attrition that we could easily win. But we don’t
It would be cheaper to keep our troops there instead of roating them, letting some go home for the holidays, prosecuting our troops for beating prisoners, taking responsibility wherever possible,. It would be cheaper to have our troops wear less armor, use less surgical methods, just walk into firefights with big guns and nothing else, with no concern for casualties on either side. But we don’t.
It certainly would be cheaper to have invaded earlier, without giving Saddam a chance to concede, hide, plan, and consolidate.. just a blitzkreig of firepower killing hundreds of thousands from the air until we got an unconditional surrender. It would definitely be cheaper for us to bomb every house suspected of having a terrorist cell, and be real sorry for other casualties but never publicize them.. but instead, we do our best to strike only the insurgents, and when we foul it up, we report it to the world and try to make amends(which of course could never make up for a life, but we do make the effort instead of just saying hey, too bad). It would be easy to group all iraqis as our enemies (as we have in every other war) and treat them as such, but we don’t.
The method that most speak of when they say they don’t like our methods is the fact we went over there in the first place. Well, guess what.. we did. We were scared that iraq could finance and arm Al Qaeda, and they, after 9-11, were sabre rattling, refusing to make account of weapons (whether or not they had them). They were cursing us publicly, they had WMD at one point, they showed no problem using them on their own people, and they openly supported terrorist organizations like the PLO. They did nothing substantial to make us think they were not going to use the WMD (which they had at one point) through a terrorist org (which they support) against their enemies (us) and specifically against civilians (like the Kurds). Today, they bomb civilian targets, kill troops just guarding their post (with no military objective in mind, except to inflict random death for the sake of inflicting random death), and do so by killing their own civilians (just like the human shields used in the first gulf war).. but we don’t.
I, for one, am satisfied with the monetary impact – because at the end of the day, it would be chepaer to kill a lot more people.. but we don’t
This article says it all…
In searching for some relevant quotes, I found this blog posting which really sums up my emotions on the matter. I feel like we’re doing half-measures to appease people, when we should have just done it right the first time. I’m no “hawk”, nor “dove”, but if humanity is going to do something as stupid as deciding to go slaughter one another again (we’ve been doing this a long time, and have lots of excellent justifications for it), then let’s do it right and stop leaving so many loose ends.
My only objection to the article is that he, like many others, is unable to see the difference between “lose” and “loose”.
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Matthew P. Barnson
Amen
What he said.
Humbly disagree
Because this article, while an interesting point of view, talks in hindsight about the problems with GW1, which is very different than GW2. The casualties on our side have been awful, each one of them.. but still minimal. We are doing our best to not leave loose ends now, and still there are idiots telling us we need to “get out now”.
But I do agree.. the article “looses” something.
The greatest casualty
I don’t mean to minimize the impact on the lives of the families of servicemen and women who have been lost in the Middle East by what I’m about to say. Curiously, the current death rate of our service men and women is considerably lower than our national average of a similar age per 1,000… which means it’s safer for you to be a serviceman in Iraq right now than it is for you to drive your car to work 😉
And I definitely don’t think we need to “get out now”. We’ve committed ourselves to reconstruction over there. We did a fantastic job with Germany and Japan after World War II, and I hope that we’ll do an even better job this time around.
What I consider the greatest casualty of the war is our freedom. One thing I failed to mention in my blog about my trip back from Spokane Washington in my new Insight was my trip there. I had a very violating and obnoxious encounter with airport security prior to boarding the plane. Although a minor incident, it led me to do more reading, and to realize that the Bush administration, in combination with a hyper-reactive Congress, has passed legislation:
The problem with a “war on terror” is that terror will never end. It’s been an effective combat tactic since before the American Revolution where our side used terrorism to push the British out. The “war on terror” must be ended, the provisions of the PATRIOT and subsequent acts that grant emergency powers to the executive branch must be allowed to sunset and thereby be rescinded, and we must take back our computer networks from the all-seeing electronic eye of the FBI. People say “if you’re not guilty of something, then you have nothing to fear”. I say, “I’m guilty of consistently criticizing my government’s stupid moves, and there’s nothing more criminal in the eye of beaurocracy than criticism.”
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Matthew P. Barnson
Sorry to reply to my reply…
Just so you guys know, it’s easier to follow threads of conversation if you click the “reply” link under the message you’re reading. That way, your reply gets put at the right indentation to make it clear what you’re responding to… I just realized Paul’s comment, instead of agreeing with Justin’s comment, looks like he’s agreeing with me, which he’s probably not 🙂
So I’m going to nuke the “comments at the bottom of the node” function, so you’ll need to click “reply” in order to reply, somewhere at least. Hope you don’t mind, it’s just a small thing that’s been bugging me for a long time. Particularly as the conversations get more involved, keeping the thread of conversation becomes more and more difficult…
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Matthew P. Barnson
comment sorting…
Matt, I fixed the same problem on MurphyMaphia. It was frustrating to see posts and comments out of order. I realized that the SQL query that populates these pages sorts by Node ID (nid) rather than by date. I changed mine to sort by Created Date but you could choose Changed Date as well.