The Real Sucking Sound

The Pentagon under Robert Gates has now moved fully away from the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice Cold War model of thinking about national security. Review shows dramatic shift in Pentagon's thinking - CNN.com

Too bad more than 5,000 American men and women have died and more than 35,000 have been wounded in the paean to past mistakes extant in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to mention - because it is not mentioned in the US - the more than 1 million civilian casualties in these wars. (Well, they are not really wars, since only Congress can declare war and they have never done so.)

However, the greatest damage from Rummy's cold war strategy has the been economic toll of the conflicts. To date, spending amounts to more than 1 trillion dollars. This number does not include the costs of future lost wages for disabled vets, the costs of treatment (including psychiatric treatment for PSTD), the cost of human suffering nor the cost in terms of losses associated with human service programs and education whose resources are drained daily in trade-offs taken to pay for the conflicts.

Gates is moving in the right direction. But he is pushing against a military industrial complex that has become quite used to feeding off the government teat.

In 1992 Ross Perot became famous for his projection that the NAFTA treaty would create a "giant sucking sound" to the south as money flowed from the US to Central America. Turns out that Perot was right about the government's creation of a giant sucking sound, he just had the geography - and the suckers - wrong.

PTags: Iraq, Afgahanistan, Robert Gates, cost of warowered by Qumana