This stuff isn't even ancient history. During the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 the military blew up a random vehicle from a drone in the middle of Kabul, killing 10 civilians (including 7 children), and then immediately branded them terrorists.
I worked for a defense contractor when the mistargeted drone strike on Ahmadi occurred killing him and 9 family members (including 7 children). Based on internal information available at the time, there's a very good chance that the drone strike was mistargeted due to software bugs.
In particular, a "track this car" feature that worked against satellite and aerial surveillance was available in software used by those in the military's operations teams. I've poked around in that software to determine that it was definitely buggy, but this did not prevent the feature from being offered to users. I've been assured that users were essentially told "don't click this button that automates watching vehicles and instead do it yourself", but laziness and crisis crunch time of the American exit from Afghanistan makes it very realistic that users were overwhelmed and trying anything to stay on top of things.
I lay those deaths at least partially on software and the cavalier way that life-or-death circumstances are systematically ignored by the defense contractor software industry.
The withdrawal also once again established that the nation doesn't care about its responsibility and the consequences of its actions (Iraq -> Daesh, AF->Taliban and all achieved progress and hope ruined), only its own costs and troops (go-to excuse for AF: how long do you expect us to stay?)
What "progress" and "hope" exactly? If you mean the attempt of the US to brainwash the local population with western secular ideologies and hope to eat McDonald's and BK "cuisine", thanks to God it didn't work out. Also, Taliban and Da'esh are not the same, let's not mix things up and water things down.
The masks have fallen and exposed the monsters behind them. This whole tragedy for the people of those occupied countries was in western eyes nothing more than continued occupation, resource stealing, weapons testing, and meddling in middle eastern affairs post WWI under the false guise of "freedom" and "democracy". And now they end up defeated and retreating in humiliation.
And they're "enslaved" how? Because the western backed media told their viewers that those women should be free to be naked and follow their western peers, otherwise they're "oppressed" and miserable?
They are denied education, freedom of movement, and freedom of conscious.
It is not slavery, as you are correct to point out - it is a regressive reading of Islam and its insistence on removing the sexual from the public space (which is fine - it is in principle a modality of civilization — that takes that stance which is not inherently oppressive of a given sex, it places restrictions on both sexes’ behavior in public space).
A sign of your backwardness is considering women —- decent, moral, upright but lacking a covering tent — as “naked”. But imo, it is not that the woman showing hair is “naked”, rather the eyes that behold are soaked in lust. It is this lust that you can not control, so “let’s control women”.
That's what the media tells you. What we should do is give them the benefit of the doubt until they clear the brainwashing attempts the west tried to put in their curricula. They already said they have no issues with women getting education, let's give them time to clear up the mess that the west made, after 20 years of bombardment and brainwashing and occupation.
A sign of your bigotry to straw man the argument and then describe the veil that our women wear as "tents". It's a sad spectacle that the "white man's burden" exists to this day.
”Free to be naked”.
The women of Afghanistan are not allowed to leave their houses without being completely covered and without a male member of the family.
The women of Afghanistan are the biggest losers of the western worlds withdrawal.
Now wait 50+ years of oppression and you want to sweep it under the rug???
No they're not losers, the opposite in fact. Contrary to what the media tells you, many women are happy. Comments here are proving my points further. We don't need western "liberation" thank you very much.
I read about some of the torturing that has been done to those prisoners... I don't think there are words that can capture the sheer insanity of it all. I .. can't imagine how anyone could do something like that to a living being.
What Guantanamo is horrible but in a historical context it is pretty tame. How can you know about slavery, the holocaust, etc. and be unable to imagine force feeding prisoners who are hunger striking.
> Mr. Nashiri claimed that in 2013, he was subjected to 'rectal feeding' and sodomized with a broom handle by prison staff.
> In 2014, the Obama administration released a 500-page document that detailed some of the CIA’s ‘black site’ program. The document confirms that rectal feeding is a method of torture used by prison staff.
I don’t consider rape, anal feeding, and everything else to be “force feeding prisoners who are hunger striking”.
Just saying "well, the Holocaust was worse" isn't exactly the best defense of foreign policy, is it?
When you claim to be "the land of the free" and a "bringer of democracy" you can't be doing a Guantanamo without coming across like a massive hypocrite. Morals and ethics can't be thrown away the second they become mildly inconvenient.
I never was defending it, they said they were shocked that humans were capable of doing what was done at Guantanamo. I was just saying that there are some other historical events that will really surprise them.
Well, had you read about anal feeding, and the rapes, and everything else, you'd be equally appalled. I am not saying that these have not happened in the holocaust or other such events, but I am appalled that this was done recently, and that there exist people willing to commit those acts.
> I am appalled that this was done recently, and that there exist people willing to commit those acts.
You should be appalled but not surprised. The world is full of monstrous, terrible people, and not just dictators and high up masterminds, but terrible average joes. If you posted a job opportunity that openly said "Job duties: Inflicting torture, rape, and suffering on people we will convince you are bad" you would not have to look far to find job candidates lined up to do it.
Obama issued an executive order to close it on his second full day in office. Congress blocked it. He continued trying to close it throughout both of his terms, and Congress continued to prevent that.
Not any hospital but one run and staffed by doctors without borders. A hospital which was specifically on a non-target list and was known by the US military. The supposed mistake is akin to accidentally dropping a bomb on one of your own bases. Accidents do happen but something like this is a huge failure in US military procedures.
I don't mean to be rude, but you should get over it because this is the world we live in and pearl clutching isn't going to stop them. Don't be sad, get mad!
> Pearl-clutching is a deliberate bad-faith reaction to a comment and a form of civil POV-pushing. It is done in order to exaggerate the effects and impacts said comment had.
I merely spoke about the atrocities I read about, and expressed my disbelief in how a person could even commit something like that.
I completely understand your sentiment but sadly for many Americans the lives of other people just don’t matter. We frequently don’t even care about our own citizens here (too many examples to list).
It’s a point raised and emphasized because it’s the only chance we have to try to get people to care about the atrocious things we’re doing. Even something as simple and clear as this line has been very ineffective in bringing about any change.
Just think about the opportunity cost of that much money. I am fairly certain that $8T would do any one several of the following things:
1. Covert our Economy to post carbon. Completely. All Nuclear, Hydro, Solar, and Wind.
2. Pull enough CO2 out of the Atmosphere to get it back to carbon neutral.
3. Put a colony on the Moon, and on Mars, along with a new Space Station. (just for kicks)
4. Give every man, woman, and child in the United States a $26,000 check.
So it goes.
If you threw it into nuclear, yes, we could have at least removed 90% of fossil fuels from our energy grid while making our energy grid far more resilient in the process and making the electric car revolution easier (energy too cheap to meter and all that jazz).
I don't think investing in more Hydro is a good option personally. Too much environmental consequence from flooding the massive areas required.
8T 20 years ago would not have accelerated the pace of solar/wind much and it's dubious if it would even be useful today, there are better solutions (nuclear).
Similar with moon/mars colony. We don't lack the money for a mars shot, we could do it pretty cheaply, we just lack the will to do it. At this point Musk will assuredly get there first and cheaper.
The use of "we" feels so unfair when a very large majority of the people were against it the entire time. "We" couldn't do anything about it, as usual.
> very large majority of the people were against it the entire time
I don't think this claim holds up to the evidence. Looking at opinion polls between 9/11 and 2003's invasion of Iraq makes it unclear that a "very large majority" was against the invasion. Here's a quickly-found Gallup poll[0] from October 2002 wherein 53% of polled Americans supported a ground invasion of Iraq.
The American people were misled by government claims about WMDs and handwavy connections between Iraq and 9/11. But that doesn't permit us to retroactively declare that "well, if only the people knew in 2002 what we know now then they would have been against it."
>The American people were misled by government claims about WMDs and handwavy connections between Iraq and 9/11. But that doesn't permit us to retroactively declare that "well, if only the people knew in 2002 what we know now then they would have been against it."
Can you explain more? If the American people knew they were being lied to in order to create support for a war, why would they support the war? The argument at the time, repeated all over the media, was that the war was necessary because of WMDs.
53% is a narrow majority supporting invasion, you don't think knowing they were being tricked would have caused at least a 5% swing?
People tolerate being lied to by politicians because they see it as politicians having to convince others to go along with a plan they believe and agree with. They don't see it as politicians lying to them, it's politicians who they approve of and agree with lying to others to convince them to go along with an agenda they approve of.
In other words, it's okay for politicians to lie because the supporters of those politicians believe they are in on the lie.
Sorry, I was trying to make an almost pedantic point. I agree with you that deceiving the public is important to understanding what/why. However, the claim that "very large majority of the people were against it the entire time" is false, and trivially testable. 53% in favor of war means at most 47% against. 47% is not "very large majority".
Would people have been against it _conditioned on having knowledge from today that was unavailable then_? Possibly, but this hypothetical doesn't move discussion in a useful direction.
That’s simply not true. A very large majority were in favor.
Some were opposed, yes.
Using “we” is a proper generalization. Everybody is offended by generalizations today. (See what I did there?) but you can’t talk coherently without them.
Sure, but also as much as it may make you feel old, those polls were of people over 18 in 2003, and about half of the current US population does not fit that bill.
The effect is even more dramatic when you presume polls always skew older.
I know many of the unpolled 1 year olds who are now 24 probably never thought the war was a good idea.
My point is that America in 2003 feels the same to people who were alive then, but blaming Americans alive today for Iraq is like blaming Americans alive in 2003 for being pro-Grenada.
You wouldn’t have changed a thing. The wars were in the making for over a decade by the time 9/11 happened. That was just the opportunity for them to fully put those plans in motion.
If anyone or group actually did “more” they would have been branded a traitor and thrown in prison — or worse.
If "we" is misinformative, it seems like the opposite of coherent.
It is possible to use some sort of set theory terminology to avoid misleading people, but then that wouldn't really be "proper" (culturally acceptable).
While it feels unfair to say "we", what have you done to stop this?
Have you protested? Written to your representatives? Contributed to a NGO fighting these things? Etc.
Or did you let your tax money fund this destruction with little opposition?
I'm being harsh, and probably a hypocrite. But it's easy to be against something in words, but do little to change it sitting comfortably and safe at a distance.
I did. I even almost got arrested on multiple occasions for it.
> Written to your representatives?
Hell, I went to Washington DC and their local offices on multiple occasions and told them to their faces what I thought of them for doing what they were doing.
Didn't do a damn thing, could have done more. Should have done more.
This is important to remember. One reason it might feel unfair now though is some combination of a) to many people, it is clear the war was a mistake and they remember always being against it now and b) some 35% of the current adult US population, including myself, wasn’t old enough to be polled then, but was legitimately against the war always.
I'm not sure anything would have changed if we knew we were lied to. 2001-2002 was a strange time. A lot of people just wanted war--with anyone. It didn't really matter who we invaded. The Cold War ending meant the USA was out of overt enemies, and this was a real bummer to people who loved war and belligerence, so the sooner we could make enemies and start fighting, the better.
I have always opposed these wars, and I use "we" to position myself in them. History has shown that we were right to oppose them, and in fact were justified in using much more radical resistance than we did. My "we" is contrition and repentance for not doing so.
I didn’t live in the US during that time, and I even know this isn’t true. Heck, just talk to any Muslim American who was working or growing up during that time period.
It's a government "for the people and by the people" and clearly the people either approve or doesn't care enough. So yes, "we" the people applies here.
This "for the people and by the people" thing does not appear to be empirically true. Here's a study out of Harvard:
> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
Hundreds of thousands of lives and unimaginably vast fortunes were both thrown away. In exchange, a few thousand people captured a small amount of that spending and got somewhat wealthier.
But even then, most of that was captured by only a few families.
Well they said they were sorry, what else do you want from them? The TV says dubya is a good guy now because he dislikes trump, you'd have to be some kind of fascist to disagree with that logic.
> We drone-killed a minor US citizen in a foreign country without a trial.
And his US citizen father[1]! There's a good article somewhere about Obama toiling with these decisions (he reportedly gave the go ahead for both dronings).
You used the word accident and called out an example of the US citizen killed.
In fact, we had military and private contractors commit war crimes, and even the ethical folks did things that contributed to millions getting displaced.
We redefined how we classify male civilians. If you’re a male and end up being in the wrong place, you’re just another casualty and classified as a militant.
Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush clan did some truly horrific things. Kidnapping people with any kind of trial. Dropping bombs in Western Pakistan on weddings because there’s some suspected leader of an organization we don’t like, even if they simply aren’t terrorists but don’t want America in the region.
SUMMARY
Over 940,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence.
An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.
Over 432,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting.
38 million — the number of war refugees and displaced persons.
The U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion.
The U.S. government is conducting counterterror activities in 85 countries.
At least four times as many active duty personnel and war veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died of suicide than in combat.
The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the U.S. and abroad.
In addition to direct costs, there are the opportunity costs of these terrible wars. Since 2001 we Americans allowed US manufacturing to be hollowed out, failed to solve immigration, stood idly by as wealth accumulated in the hands of an ever smaller percentage of our citizens, watched drug deaths climb over 100K per annum, ...
If this is what victory looks like, I would hate to see defeat.
This is, perhaps, a consequence of countries like China choosing to subsidize their manufacturing sectors at the expense of domestic demand. China subsidizes, producing cheaper goods, which are gobbled up by the west, leaving China w/ excess dollars that it then needs to park in US Treasuries, depressing lending rates and making it cheaper for the USG to run deficits. https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis is a big proponent of this sort of reasoning.
Can we stop this non-sense? China cannot subsidize industries out of thin air, especially that they came off as a poor country. What China did is they kept their wages lower to "expand" or as we say in Tech "scale". It certainly didn't pay you to get their products and that would not be possible especially at China's scale.
> China cannot subsidize industries out of thin air
Correct. Their industrial subsidies come at the expense of China's domestic spending ability. Many pundits, including the one I linked, believe that China must allow increased domestic demand but this is politically unfavorable in China due to the entrenched interests and beliefs in the necessity of a strong industrial base.
How is this different than saying every investment is a subsidy? China's future domestic spending capability is obviously expanding as it invests in industrial capability.
Thanks to compounding, if they have consistently spent half as much as "they should" elsewhere for decades, there is some moment where they will reach more absolute domestic spending without ever raising that rate to where it "should" be.
I don't know, if you're interested I'd read more from the guy I pointed out above.
Off the top of my head, I'll say that China is making a trade-off to subsidize manufacturing at the expense of wages. This can take the form of 'malinvestment' or misallocation of capital(see the ghost cities, trains to nowhere, "Belt and Road" malinvestment, etc) which boost manufacturing in the short term while leaving little benefits in the long term. It also leaves China with weak domestic consumption so more of the GDP growth must be derived from manufacturing in order to meet CCP growth targets.
Further, the subsidies come at the expense of efficiency. For instance, China leads the world in cotton subsidies despite having 4x competing countries' costs to grow cotton. These subsidies do not necessarily translate into some future benefit for Chinese citizens.
Lol you can’t blame China for doing business with US corporations. It was many two way transactions
The US makes different to subsidy or protection choices with their own effects. selective agriculture is subsidized and insured while things like Trucks are protected - inflating the size, pollution footprint, and selection of vehicles in the US.
We also have an indirect manufacturing & tech subsidy through military spending. Not super efficient at developing our economy but not a small effect either.
I support where the US is rethinking the balance of subsidy and protection on computer chips but wish some of the existing ossified decisions were revisited or rebalanced.
It's not that I'm blaming China as much as I'm trying to explain the mechanics. Of course US consumers and corporations chose to take the path of immediate gratification, leading to the hollowing out of the American working class and mfg base. But it also led to decades of low inflation, a soaring bond market, and increased standard of living for Americans overall(even though some classes, like blue collar workers(particularly men) suffered).
How I'm reading your comment in the context of the topic is that if the US hadn't been involved in a costly war effort, they could have perhaps countered the moves China made by allocating trillions to support their own industry. They might not have, but at least it would have been possible without the war.
I don't fully understand all the dynamics, but you run into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma if you want to be the world's reserve currency while simultaneously possessing a competitive manufacturing and exporting sector. So even if the US hadn't been involved in the war, its industry would have been hamstrung and unable to compete effectively due to a strong dollar.
It's time we stop the war machine --both parties are in on it. It won't stop violence, but it'll be on their terms and if they want to destroy themselves, why should we get in their way?
Some of the violence is directly done by us, some encouraged by us and some of it is natively fomented --I don't care. Bring us all back home and let the world duke it out for themselves.
Imagine what we could have done for ourselves with $8T dollars (child development, motherhood, infrastructure, education)! No, instead we piss it on wars.
Damned Neocons.
We don't need to be the world's "daddy". Countries have to figure things out for themselves. It's like trying to tell a kid how to grow up based on one's own experience. It doesn't work, kids have to figure things out for themselves.
If one country wants to have a violent theocratic dictatorship and another a violent communist dictatorship, and another just thinks we're pigs, you know what: let them work it out. Maybe it takes 100 years. Let them write their own history.
How has that worked out so far? A legacy of ashes as the CIA book goes. US foreign intervetionist policy of the last 20 years has been nothing but one colossal disaster after another.
Yes!!! As a wealthy progressive who votes blue no matter who I too support the military industrial complex and think not being russia should be the only requirement to join NATO.
Yes. They were not an ally until after the war started. You don't get to say "nah we don't need you" and then rely on billions of dollars after the fact, and then join the pact and reap the official benefits once the going gets bad.
Maybe you forgot the little detail where Ukraine gave up 1700 nuclear bombs on a promise from Russia and the United States that they have nothing to worry about. Russia wiped their ass with that promise, should we do the same?
That revolution was tainted by outside interests influencing the outcome --one of the influencers was Russia, but there also was another one -one which eventually tried to smooth things over with an "overload". Kind of like when China or USSR piss in LatAm, we kind of get irked.
" It's time we stop the war machine --both parties are in on it. It won't stop violence, but it'll be on their terms and if they want to destroy themselves, why should we get in their way?"
What happens when you tell people this and suggest we stop sending arms and munitions to Ukraine?
It was in the MIC and security states' best interests, made popular by taking advantage of a tragedy and wielding propaganda. Honestly, GG to the people running the show at the time. It was a very clever play. Have to give credit where credit's due. We willingly surrendered so many rights.
We literally have all of history as an example of how bad Afghanistan invasions go for the invader. One prime example being the Soviet Union utterly failing just ~two decades prior.
Certainly not every intervention was a great idea, no, but that doesn't mean the right thing to do is never intervene. I'd argue the right thing to do is learn from that and not do that again.
So what interventions after WW2 do you support?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
The intervention in the Korean war?
The intervention in the Vietnam war?
Intervening in the Laotian Civil War?
The Permesta Rebellion?
Lebanon crisis? Bay of Pigs?
Invading Panama? Invading Grenada?
It provides the US military with invaluable combat experience and allows it to test/improve its strategies, equipment, and intelligence capabilities.
(Of course, fighting wars so one can remain combat-ready is the very definition of treating other people as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves, and so very much offends against the moral sensibility. But the question here is about self-interest.)
Because America recognizes the benefit in addition to bearing the cost.
Like the federal debt, we always look at only half the balance sheet to maximize sensationalism.
[edit] with this type of geopolitical posturing especially, it's very difficult to calculate the benefits of everything that didn't happen as a result of your intervention, so it's especially easy to ignore. Just like investing in unit testing. How many incidents didn't happen because of the tests you wrote - and how much did that save the company? The set is probably uncountable, but we do generally accept that it's greater than zero.
Okay but you can make the same argument in reverse that the potential uncountable benefits aren't likely to be great enough for it to be acceptable to you. And many of us have come to that conclusion.
Because we have the capacity and values to do so. In the end, doing nothing now will cost more in the long run.
If America wants to be great again, it will do so through leadership, not through self-centered isolationism. Should a gap be created, the likes of Russia and China will fill it. Is that the world leadership you want?
As I've aged I've transformed from a Ron Paul libertarian to more of a "Strong America" moderate liberal.
It's very seductive to believe that the world is a nice place and none of its issues will ever show up at our doorstep if we just leave the rest of the world alone. But sadly the world will always have strong powers and they will set the rules. I'd rather be on the winning team. If someone is going to be the world police/power-broker I want it to be us.
That's not to say we are perfect or don't need to improve. The US is deeply flawed and has caused a lot of trouble over the last century. But I'd rather be in the position we're in now vs having Russia or China be the power-broker with an even greater list of failures and abuses.
> The U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion.
Probably explains a lot of the inflation we have seen recently. Gotta pay for it somehow, one way is to make each dollar worth less. It's a stealth tax increase.
The majority contributor to inflation we’ve seen recently is a profit margin increases by corporations in poorly competitive markets. Decades of weak anti trust enforcement coming to roost
We had that forever. The only real trigger is the pandemic stimulus, both the PPP “loans” and the stimulus handed out to normal people. That lit the fuse.
You can literally hear the discussion at public company quarterly calls. Companies are praising the success of raising prices to inflate profit margins.
Every business will price their services to the maximum profit point that the market will bear. This is always the case in a capitalistic society.
What changed with the "free" money handouts is that the price point that market can bear increased resulting in higher profit margins than before. Supply limitations and shortages played a part as well as increased cash and hence demand from people.
As this excess savings and money dries out, the equilibrium price point will move the profit margins back to long term averages although it is a slow process.
Somehow the blow back against the Russian people for the war crimes Putin is committing seems way out of proportion if you compare it with the non existing blow back the US suffered.
There was no boycott of US products or banning of US athletes. In fact the US itself "boycotted" the use of the word "French fryes" (in certain government buildings) because the French didn't want to play along renaming them to "freedom fryes".
Of course not, but that's not what this is about. It's an answer to your comment, because you wrote "It's because the Russian people support what Putin is doing.". But if that was true, wouldn't the US would have been boycotted, as well? But it didn't happen
Nothing would see me happier than to wake up one morning and read that Putin is swinging from a gallows somewhere but I would take any polls of the Russian population with a grain of salt given the history of people being jailed, disappeared, and/or assassinated for speaking out against his regime.
> It's because the Russian people support what Putin is doing.
How could you possibly know that this is the reason?
What is it about these topics that cause people to think this way? Imagine the mess we'd have if we wrote software using this quality/form of logic, it might be as big of a mess as the political world.
Really makes you wonder, if the public could be as compelled by anything non-security related, what insane problems and projects we could take on with $8T USD.
> In 2021, as the economy reeled from the pandemic, a one-year expansion of the child tax credit led to a historic 46 percent decline in the child poverty rate. But new census data shows a dramatic reversal with the rate of children in poverty skyrocketing in 2022. Experts say it’s due to the end of pandemic-era safety net policies and inflation.
And that's the irony. Covid's death toll in the US was a hundred times worse than 9/11 yet we still don't have federally mandated sick days.
State provided insurance coverage was expanded but that expansion is ending over the next year, however 20 years after 9/11 the military and intelligence apparatus put in place is still intact.
To compound this problem, as our working population ages, in order to keep our age dependency ratio healthy, we are allowing a million+ immigrants a year in. Please don't flame me, I don't have an opinion, this is a fact and a choice, and it has consequences.
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/greenpa...
All of these are leading towards a housing and / or financial crisis and / or currency crisis. Whichever comes first. There are tent cities and homeless in most large urban areas, and, as this is Canada, this winter will be brutal.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-...
I know that the general opinion of Canada is that nothing ever happens, and to an extent that was largely true. I believe the next few years will be very difficult for Canadians, and, incredibly, given that Canadians use more energy per capita than the Americans, it will be a difficult transition to a lower energy use profile.
Being Canadian I am aware of these things, but I do feel like a frog in a pot - it didn't seem that critical. I agree with you about the next few years being very difficult. I'm in Quebec (woohoo hydro) and am ressourceful enough not to be worried for myself, but it won't be easy for most.
I was not aware of the separatist rumblings in the west, I'll look it up.
People who think it proper to shut the bank account of a Freedom convoyer while applauding a literal, actual Nazi in Parliament have neither the intelligence nor the moral credibility to regulate the information we consume.
What's stopping the US from solving these incredible social, scientific etc problems isn't money. It's the will of the people in particular politicians. Many of whom are themselves taking money by people and companies who benefit from these problems being unsolved.
The comment you're calling naive is clearly aware of this fact, given the statement "if the public could be as compelled by anything non-security related".
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
It really wasn't for oil though. Iraq was likely revenge for an attempted assassination of Bush Sr.
Also, the Taliban offered an unconditional surrender but Bush rejected it.
Now, instead, we have tens of thousands of young men who watched their little brother/sister/cousin/mother/father get blown up by American machinery, many of whom have never heard of 9/11.
> It was in the waning days of November 2001 that Taliban leaders began to reach out to Hamid Karzai, who would soon become the interim president of Afghanistan: They wanted to make a deal.
> “The Taliban were completely defeated, they had no demands, except amnesty,” recalled Barnett Rubin, who worked with the United Nations’ political team in Afghanistan at the time.
> Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future.
> But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal.
> “The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time, adding that the Americans had no interest in leaving Mullah Omar to live out his days anywhere in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or dead.
> People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.
I appreciate that they include interest payments and obligations to veterans. Those costs are rarely considered when "defense" spending is discussed.
I was one of the many people who protested the Iraq War. In fact, the final protest I attended in February 2003 was the largest single-day protest in American history (though the first Women's March may have beat it). Not that it did any good. Both political parties and every ratings-hungry corner of the media was cheerleading the march to war. CNN must have had staff working overtime to make all those war-themed transition graphics.
The other often forgotten cost is the loss of freedom and privacy. Young people don't know any better, but there was an era where both the government and banks did little surveillance.
I mean US was building things, just the wrong ones (bombs and fighter jets)
The infrastructure destroyed by the US is probably of near zero value, given that they were fighting against failed states. Yugoslavia being the exception in this.
No we are just comparing values. The value of the American weapons is significantly higher than the value of the infrastructure they destroyed by orders of magnitude. So from a money perspective American wars were a net positive.
Which is why I hate the original article. Money is not the reason why waging war is bad.
It’s the loss of human lives and well being. And that does not have a dollar value. The price of the life of my kid is infinite.
Add in all the wars since WWII — the US has been living with a negative ROI the whole time, & has somehow managed to this point to kick the can down the road on paying it off. Had the foreign adventurism of McKinley and Roosevelt, as well as Wilson's crazed forcing the US into WWI not gotten into the nation's blood, imagine how well-off its people could be.
That's the /citizen/ price tag. Saying it's the "federal price tag" abstracts away the true meaning of what happened here. Our tax dollars were stolen to prosecute an unjust war based on a complete and total lie.
No, the citizen price tag is the 1+ hour you lose to the "temporary" security theater every single time you fly on an airplane despite it demonstrably doing absolutely nothing.
It's not inaccurate to call things paid for by the federal government (which yes, are indeed funded by your tax dollars) the "federal price tag".
I didn't say it was inaccurate, I said it was intentionally abstracted to hide the actual truth. The federal government doesn't have money to pay for these things. It raised taxes to compensate. It _was_ your money. And yes, as you've noted, they even took your money and then used it to make your life even worse and costly.
For the normal people out there who can't quite process numbers this big, let's put that in cognizable terms.
The US has an estimated 580,000 homeless people. If I'm understanding this all correctly, $8T would buy each and every one of those people a 13.8 million dollar mansion.
There was no sentiment in my analysis. Unless you count 'bruh'.
I was quite clear on the tense of the statement: "The US has..." etc.
This is a ridiculous statistic however you cut it. Multiple the homeless stat by 20 (a vast overestimate) and you STILL give every one of them a ridic house. What's going on here is unfathomably evil.
I think it’s hard to describe any country in foreign affairs “good”. Typically, we expect nations to pursue their best interests. Still, we (the U.S.) we’re probably as close to being the “good” guys as a nation could be during WW2. I’m not really convinced we continued to be afterwards.
But we have been the “law and order” and “free trade” guys. That doesn’t necessarily mean “good”, and I question whether our commitment to free trade was anything other than a way to put pressure on the USSR’s economy. Still, “law and order” can at least guarantee a measure of peace.
But I think with Iraq we burned that reputation away - it’s gone. Now we’re just some bitter friendless policeman with too many guns who’s really just riding out of what’s left of the momentum produced by our past global position.
The title seems a bit misleading, since this includes things such as estimates for increased veterans costs until 2050 and homeland security counterterrorism efforts.
“The cost is X” isn’t the same as “The projected cost through 2050 is X.” There are multiple comments in this very discussion that mistakenly thinking that the total is the money that has been spent rather than the money that will be spent over the next few decades.
It is important to note that US Defense spending is at an all time high (even though the US has exited Iraq), so calling this 'The price tag for Iraq' instead of the 'Price tag of the US's overall military strategy' is arguable disingenuous.
It's been a bit more than 8000 days since 9/11. So the US federal government spent about $1BN/day, or about $3 per person per day. So, from all the taxes I've been paying to the US government over all these years, they have taken $3 each day and allocated it to wars. If that's the case, there's a good chance I spent more money at Starbucks over the same period.
I think you can look beyond studies and say if teachers can only afford used pinto's, and have to use their own money for school supplies, that maybe some more money would help.
If there are some heavily funded schools that perform badly, that isn't an argument that kids in underfunded schools should go hungry.
These studies really cherry pick scenarios to advance the agenda that we should get rid of public schools so we can have private religious schools.
Definitely something to think about as we have to reign in the federal spending which is currently keeping our economy afloat.
There is some low-hanging fruit, given that a significant portion of our military will likely be replaced by drones over the next couple decades, but we still have significant entitlement programs that need to be paid for.
My advice to folks is go heavy into your Roth IRA. Taxes are only going up, and, assuming no one in government figures out a way to claw back the tax-free returns on a Roth, you're going to need the tax relief.
It's called the "military-industrial complex". And for a large part it literally went up in smoke - that's what tends to happen with ammunition in wars.
and we literally launched into another expensive proxy war literally as soon as we left afghanistan. i think if you told people in 2008 that this would be the case, they would find it impossible to comprehend.
Less than a year's GDP for that many years of war including Veteran's benefits seems pretty cheap as wars go.
That is not an analysis of whether it could've been spent better, just a statement about war costs generally. Clearly not a total war at all. Barely a partial one.
Can one nation please try an experiment? Make the public approve all government spending by popular votes, but only those who voted for a bill have to pay th taxes for it.
[old man smiles at arguments/rants he’s read and heard over last 60 years]
9/11/2001 was 22 years ago
8T/22 years means 360B/year USD
The US military expenses covers basically the global military security needs of all of the Americas and de facto a large percentage of Western Europe/EU, ASEAN, etc.. Let’s just say 1 Billion people who haven’t experienced major World War level conflict against their territory or against their civilians since 9/11 (or, for that matter, since WWII). The bill for US citizens for that over the last 22 years has been roughly $360/yr, USD. (There have been armed conflicts in the period and much suffering as a result. But there hasn’t been real worldwide suffering…World War level suffering.)
Imagine a US family in 1943. Someone offers to bring their loved ones home that very day from the moronic European/Asian conflicts safe and sound. Will cost them, say, $100/yr head tax (could call it Security as a Subscription but what an absurd acronym that would make). $100 was a lot of money in 1943, but a guarantee of no orphans, no widows, no funerals, no rations, no torture, no struggles, no threats to the Four Freedoms. Every single family in the US in 1943 would have taken that offer. And they would, and do, take that offer every year up to the present. And it has worked (for the most part). Certainly for the Americas, EU, Japan, British Commonwealth, ASEAN,…
Now imagine making the offer to those in concentration camps in 1943. Those conscripted to serve the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese empire. Those in occupied territories. They’d be lining up in droves to pay (instead of lining up to be fed starvation rations, be gassed, be forced to work in factories until they died, etc.). They’d die for the opportunity (instead of, you know, just dying).
Today’s “the West’s” military-industrial complex isn’t a perfect system and if the Department of State screws up the results are often haphazard and cruel. (Yeah, I know, let’s blame the State department.) But attempts at global political perfection haven’t succeeded in the modern era. One time they called it The War to End All Wars. Or was it the Glorious Communist Global Revolution (cf. pogroms, gulags, Mao’s great famine, Cultural Revolution, anything re: Cambodia, etc.). Sounds like a great objective to have, but when it fails in implementation, it fails catastrophically…only slightly better than the World War option, but without the psychopolitical cleansing that comes with deep trauma that does finally end.
And let’s not bring up what nuclear technologies bring to a future World War party. Really, let’s not. Weapons of policy, not of war.
From a historical perspective, it’s quite the deal the developed world has gotten in the 21st Century for their $8T. (Didn’t read the article, I assume this was their conclusion.)
I've heard similar justification for farm subsidies; paying them not to grow food, to keep prices sufficiently high. It seems wasteful until you compare it to the regular cycle of famines humanity has dealt with to this point. Turns out paying for extra unused capacity is tremendously valuable.
Something under appreciated in America’s failures is how they become fuel for cryptofascist (crypto like hidden not Bitcoin) justifications for whatever horrible behavior is dreamt up in the Kremlin or Beijing. You can see it in this thread, the invasion of Iraq becomes a populist justification for the Ukraine invasion — regardless of the distance in each countries behaviors. Horror begits horror.
We lied about WMDs to cajole and entice other countries to join us in invading Iraq.
We tortured prisoners.
We killed reporters (accidentally) and lied about it (intentionally).
We drone-killed a minor US citizen in a foreign country without a trial.
I watched 9/11 happen with my own eyes and it was incalculably tragic but we've done some very shitty things in return.