N
ow that President Barack Obama has declared U.S. combat operations in Iraq over, it might be useful to remember just how much this effort and the one in Afghanistan cost.
This is particularly important right now since there is so much hullabaloo over federal spending. The immediate critical question is whether there should be more stimulus spending or not to try to invigorate the stumbling recovery.
Another curious point is that a good part of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (stimulus) funds haven’t even been spent yet. In Virginia, for instance only about $3.2 billion of the $5.5 billion in stimulus funding for Virginia had been spent as of Aug. 1. The Wall Street Journal has reported that only a fraction of stimulus funding for such efforts as infrastructure, housing, education and homeland security has been spent.
This once again puts the cart before the horse. If there’s such an outcry among the right wing, including many bloggers and commenters here, how come they don’t point out that a lot of this infamous money hasn’t even been released yet? Would the recovery be faster if it were? If we had a faster recovery, wouldn’t the supposedly dangerous spiral a la “Boomergeddon” be slowed or set right?
Let’s talk about the wars. According to the National Priorities Project, $1.09 billion has been allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, It isn’t clear how much of this sum has actually been spent yet, but the end of combat operations in Iraq suggests some easing of spending is in the future, although some 50,000 U.S. still will remain in Iraq.
Afghanistan is anyone’s guess. Obama has made that the strategic U.S. priority in fighting global terror, but faces a corrupt Afghan government and centuries of history in which foreigners could never get their way. My personal experience goes back to the 1980s and the Soviet experience there. I was there in January 1989 when, with great fanfare, columns of Soviet tanks and BTRs (personnel carriers) streamed across the Amu Darya River into Uzbekistan after a futile and bloody decade of fighting.
As for how much all of this will eventually cost is anyone’s guess. Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz has put the price tag at as much as $3 trillion. As he and Linda J. Bilmes wrote in The Washington Post in 2008, “You can’t spend $3 trillion — yes, $3 trillion — on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.”
He’s right about the pain. As far as failed, well, it seemed that way in 2008. To his credit, President George W, Bush’s escalation in Iraq did seem to settle things enough to set the stage for a U.S. withdrawal of its combat forces. But the, it was Bush who got us in the probably unnecessary war with Iraq with his bogus intelligence reports of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
That’s a bit off my point. More on my point is the question: When they moan about spending do the newly-hatched deficit hawks consider the war price tag? Or are they content to blame instead the “socialist” Obama they accuse of profligate spending? It could be that Obama is guilty of not spending enough and not getting the money allocated for recovery out there in time.
Once again, the cart before the horse.
Peter Galuszka
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