Official costs of Iraq war don’t tell the whole story: The money spent over there means cutbacks at bases here. Then there is the toll on health and families. (thanks to Richard DuBoff for this one!)
WASHINGTON - During a recent visit to a military family center at Fort Hood in Texas, Joyce Raezer was dismayed to find a sign in a restroom stall asking women to clean up because janitorial service had been cut back….At Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, swimming pools closed a month early this fall, and shuttle vans were sharply curtailed in an effort to trim spending. At Fort Sam Houston in Texas, unpaid utility bills exceeded $4 million, and the base reduced mail delivery to cut costs….At the Red River Army Depot in Texas, at least 6,200 humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, trucks, and ambulances were awaiting repair because of insufficient money, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in October.
You see them everywhere: magnetic ribbons on all manner of cars, SUVs, and trucks, proclaiming our collective love for our troops. Unfortunately, all the artificial, symbolic love in the world isn’t going to give our men and women in uniform the equipment and the resources they need to fight the war in Iraq, nor will it repair the tanks, Humvees, and Bradley Fighting Vehicles needed to effectively conduct military operations there. No amount of patriotic pronouncements, magnetic ribbons, or other empty gestures will change the reality that the war in Iraq is being fought on the cheap. And we should be ashamed.
While this Administration has continued programs designed to subsidize Big Oil and other industries, they have allowed the maintenance of vital equipment and materiel to fall dangeriously behind the curve. The end result is that our sons and daughters are fighting a war quite often with insufficient protection and equipment.
But we’re sure feeling good about ourselves, aren’t we? After all, the magnetic ribbons on our SUVs are proof positive of just how much we LOVE our troops. Whatever….
WAKE AND SMELL THE CAT LITTER, willya? Jeebus, people; our sons and daughters are dying and our government is claiming poverty? Yet somehow there are sufficient funds available to ensure that Big Oil is raking in record profits? OK, I realize that this a simplistic analogy and and an even more simplistic question. What isn’t so simplistic, though, is the reality that this points up how horribly misguided our priorities and those of our government are. What could POSSIBLY be more important that ensuring that our sons and daughters, who are putting their asses (not to mention their lives) on the line every day, have exactly what they need to complete their mission with the maximum potential for survival?
The war in Iraq has exacted a toll on the people who fight it, and those they leave behind, in ways that no one could have anticipated. Yet what provisions are made to put back together what the war has ripped asunder? From the looks of things, damn little.
Post-traumatic stress disorder and problems such as drug abuse and depression have been diagnosed in more than 73,000 soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s enough people to fill a typical NFL stadium.
Internet blogs by soldiers or their wives tell of suicide attempts by soldiers haunted by the horror of combat, civilian careers harmed by reservists’ deployment and redeployment, and marriages broken by distance and the trauma of war.
“Back-to-back war deployments have changed both of us - to where it’s as if a marriage does not exist anymore,” wrote a woman calling herself Blackhawk wife on an Iraq war vets Web site. “We just go through the daily steps of life and raising children as best we can.”
Men and women doing their duty, following orders as they have sworn to and have been trained to do. But how do you put back together a family when the husband and father has returned from his third tour in Iraq a broken man? Money can fix a tank, but it’s not necessarily going to give a wife her husband back, or children their father back.
The length of the war in Iraq has strained all aspects of the armed forces, said Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon’s chief financial officer from 2001 to 2004.
“In 2003, I don’t think anybody predicted it would go as long as World War II and the wear and tear on equipment would be as intense,” said Zakheim, a vice president for global strategy consultant Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. “When I left the department, we were spending less than $4 billion a month on Iraq. Now it’s pretty much doubled.”
The length of the Iraq war surpassed that of World War II last month. The costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global fight against terrorism are expected to surpass by spring the Vietnam War’s $536 billion in inflation-adjusted costs. That’s more than 10 times the Bush administration’s $50 billion prewar estimate.
Yeah, so how’s that whole “Mission Accomplished” thing working out for you. Aren’t you glad that “major combat operations” are over? Man, if what is happening in Iraq now are “minor combat operations”….
When are we going to finally admit that we’re mired in what has become this generation’s Vietnam? When will enough be enough? And when will our sons and daughters stop being be sacrificed to support a failed policy and a failure of a President?
NOW CAN WE IMPEACH THE LYING SON OF A BITCH???
