The Wages of War

No matter what you thought about whether we should have gone into Iraq or not, at this point, it has become clear that the cost of the war in lives and dollars has exceeded any of the estimates given by the architects of the conflict.

Specifically, with the number of US war dead over 4,000 and the number of wounded a factor of 10 greater than that, it is time for our nation to start thinking about how we are all going to pitch in to help the families of those who went to fight. Unfortunately, each day that these brave men and women continue to spend in Iraq reduces our nation's ability to provide them with the types of benefits that they will need to be able to recover any semblance of normalcy in their lives upon their return home.

Robert Reich touched upon this tangentially in his most recent post on his blog. Not only are we damaging our ability to provide for our soldiers, we are also losing our ability to provide for those they left behind. Dr. Reich's analysis is short and to the point:

The war is a terribly inefficient stimulus to the US economy. A dollar spent on repairing a bridge in Iraq doesn’t have nearly the multiplier effect on our economy as a dollar spent repairing a bridge here in the United States.

More to the point – and here’s what Americans need to understand – a dollar spent in Iraq is a dollar we do not have to spend here, not only repairing our own bridges, roads, and water and sewage systems, but also giving Americans access to health insurance and children access to good schools, fully funding Social Security and Medicare, investing adequately in non-carbon based energy sources and green technologies, and borrowing less from abroad. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the real economic cost of the Iraqi War doesn’t show up in the business cycle, and it's not responsible for the current recession. The real economic cost will show up years from now in a standard of living that for most Americans will be significantly lower than we might otherwise have enjoyed.

That's for those of us not dealing with a life-changing wound received in the line of fire. And those of us not dealing with the tragic loss of a son, a daughter, a husband, a wife, a father or a mother to the chaos that is the "Iraqi theater of operations".

So what can you or I do about it? First, check this list and go and find out if your state's senators and congress folk have signed on to support the new GI Bill by clicking here.

Then go take a look at some of the stories shared by the soldiers at the IAVA web site.




They've earned it.