The Price Is Right
OK, this might be the most depressing thing I've read in a long time -- What could $456 billion buy? It's just a simple comparison of the cost of the Iraq War to various other things we could've spent the money on. Obviously there's a fair quantity of speculation and fluffiness in these numbers and analysis, but apparently, the upside is that we could have fed and educated the world's poor for FOUR YEARS and then, with the leftover cash, converted every car in America to run on ethanol. Thereby making much of the struggle for control over the Middle East irrelevant. Not to mention the fact that feeding and educating the poor could potentially have taken most of the fire out of the jihadist movement.
Again, obviously, totally speculative. But it does make you realize that there are better things we could spend our money on, no?
Comments
There's no point in arguing this, since frankly, anybody who still supports the idea that we should have gone to war in Iraq when presented with the outcome that it's resulted in is completely deluded. There's no getting around it. All we've done is made the situation in the Middle East far more violent and far less stable than it was before we removed one of the regimes in the area THAT WASN'T SPONSORING TERRORISM AGAINST THE UNITED STATES!!! The Hussein government was indisputably despicable and needed to go, but not like this, and certainly not at the hands of these ass-clowns who didn't have the first fucking clue what they were doing or how they would do it.
And putting all of that aside, you've completely missed my point. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate that there are ways to fight terrorism that don't involve blowing shit up. And one of those is to very simply do what you can to make sure that nobody WANTS to kill you. If America was an indisputable force for good in their communities, then there'd be a lot less incentive on the part of the average poor Muslim to join the organizations that target us! It's not as simple as just throwing money at food, no, but that is one example of the kind of angle we could take.
You're absolutely right about one thing, though. The average Iraqi doesn't need to worry about an education or food, because they <i>are</i> fucking dead at this point. Of course, at a rough cost of over seven million dollars per civilian killed, you'd think maybe feeding them would've been cheaper.