An you wonder about the economy?

[46zilzal]

All this wasted money comes from the taxpayer's pockets and gives ZERO return.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/iraq_war_hearing/index.htm?cnn=yes

[riskman]

Wars always cost far more than originally projected. A primary architect of the 2003 Iraq War, former US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, assured Americans the Iraq war would only cost $40 billion. The cost of occupying Iraq would be fully covered, he claimed, by plundering its oil.

Speaking of idiocy, enter the man selected by Wolfowitz to become proconsul of US-occupied Iraq, a bumbling conservative Republican hack named Paul Bremer.

During the 14 months he ran Iraq, Bremer committed two enormous follies. He dissolved Iraq’s army and police, then fired all government employees who were members of Saddam’s Ba’athist Party. Iraq was left without security forces or functioning government.

The first lesson in Imperialism 101 is that when you invade a country, the first thing to do is buy the loyalty of its army, police, and bureaucracy.

Chaos ensued in Iraq. Banks and museums were looted. Banditry was endemic. For a few hundred million dollars, the US could have hired much of Saddam’s army, security forces, and bureaucrats. Instead, the Bush/Cheney Administration declared them outlaws and began using Shia militias and death squads – called the “Iraqi Army” by the US media – to fight the Sunni resistance, so helping to trigger today’s Sunni-Shia civil war.

No sense crying over spilled milk.

John McCain has declared it will be "fine" for US troops to stay in Iraq for a hundred years. The financial numbers, however, indicate that this is strictly bluster. As President, he will either pull out and call it a victory well before his first term ends – or else preside over the bankruptcy of the United States of America.

At $120,000 per family of four, the nine trillion dollar national debt is already forcing Americans to make hard choices between health care, mortgage payments, retirement savings, and college tuition – not to mention gas and food. Imperial war, bequeathing additional trillions of debt, has become one more luxury we can't afford.

Most Americans have barely noticed the financial bite up to this point, because they've fallen into the psychological trap of ignoring the total debt so long as the government can make the interest payments. At current low interest rates, the cost of interest payments on the national debt is "only" $400 billion a year, "merely" $1300 per citizen. So if the impact of the total debt is so "minor," why worry about the "increment" caused by war?