DURING this week, I had the rare opportunity of spending a little extra time at home, something which inevitably meant a little more time watching American news programmes. Since the beginning of this column, and even before, I’ve been following the US campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan fairly closely.

In summary, my opinion on those two wars is that after 9-11, America clearly had the right to go after her attackers where they lived; where they lost the moral battle, however, was the poorly made case for invading Iraq, a country in which the US military finds itself involved some seven years later.

There are many avenues from which I’ve looked at how wrong the American presence in Iraq is, but what really hit home recently was the amount of money the country has spent on these conflicts, even as the world has entered a recession that has impacted even the richest countries, including America itself.

While African countries are starving, America has so far spent a total of about $1 trillion on the two wars, roughly three-quarters of which sum was on Iraq alone. Before I go into how absurdly twisted America’s defense spending policy is in relation to the international arena, I think it would be beneficial to see how it applies at home, in America itself.

When I started to look into how the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent in Iraq alone could have better served American interests at home, I have to admit that I met with an early disappointment. Not that there wasn’t sufficient information or anything like that, but the opposite in fact. For example, I’d expected to have to look at the cost for an ambulance and then compare it to the cost of a tank, or something to that effect. An initial search took me to the website of an agency called the National Priorities Project, an organization not primarily concerned with the war, but with scrutiny and analysis of the federal budget.

On the website, there is a convenient calculator that assesses how the money spent on the war could have been used towards more beneficent purposes. According to the website, the state of Louisiana – which I specifically entered, due to the current oil-spill crisis it is facing – has contributed some US $5.7 billion to the war in Iraq. The website then shows how the money could have alternately been spent, among other things:

“1,150,347 people receiving low-income healthcare for one year OR
11,087,257 scholarships for university students for one year OR
2,415,974 children receiving low-income healthcare for one year OR
106,323 elementary school teachers for one year OR
2,524,680 households with renewable electricity-wind power for one year.”

The above shows only how a tiny fraction of the money that has gone into the Iraq war could have been used effectively in America.

And that only concerns the money spent already, as against the fact that America’s involvement in both countries has not yet been given a specific expiration date. The true costs of the war on the American economy are however not as simple as calculating the money spent.  In a previous article, I mentioned the situation at Walter Reed Veteran’s hospital, where US veterans were subject to what some American’s would consider ‘Third World’ medical attention.

That issue caused a minor scandal in the US at the time, and resulted in sweeping changes, not only at the hospital, but in terms of veteran health care in general. This means that more money is going to be spent on American military personnel, injured or otherwise, affected by America’s two current wars.

According to a 2007 study out of Harvard University, the long-term costs of treating veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars could reach US$660 billion. That is almost as much as the Iraq conflict currently costs. According the author of the study, Linda Blimes:

“I think that the important point that we were showing in our study is that in addition to the running costs, the numbers that you see in Washington, which are the $500 billion that we’ve spent already on the war, those are cash costs of feeding the troops and paying combat pay and enlistment bonuses and paying contractors and so forth.
“But even if we walked out tomorrow, even if everyone came home tomorrow, there are substantial long-term costs of the war, which include taking care of veterans, as I’ve just discussed, replenishing the military, replacing all of the equipment, retraining the military, resetting the military to its pre-war strength, and long-term costs, structural increases in the Defense Department.”
In a recent column, I spoke about the lack of accountability in Iraq, particularly with regard to the military contractors. The truth is, even if you take the cynical position that the war in Iraq was not about the defence of America, but the country making some profit by some future control over Iraq’s oil wealth, even that is a hard case to make, since there is no evidence, not even circumstantial, available to the American people – outside of a small group of well-connected defence contractors – which points to America’s benefit, financially or otherwise, from this conflict.
On the other hand, every bullet that has been shot in Iraq has meant a few dollars less for some social programme in the States; every rocket fired is some unemployed person’s salary for a few months; and every tank built and destroyed is worth several ambulances that could have been used on a poor neighbourhood.
Even if we were to buy into the argument that the point of the Iraq war was the security of America, I would think that the definition of American security is the saving of American lives.  The events of 9-11 saw the death of less than 3,000 Americans, contrasted to the death of around 4,500 military casualties for America since the war began – granted a long time-period is involved, but within the timeframe considered, an unnecessary invasion of a sovereign country has cost more American lives than acts of terrorism.  Another way of looking at it is to consider that while America spends hundreds of millions of dollars daily in Iraq, according to another study coming out of Harvard, some 45,000 Americans die every year from lack of health insurance.
Spending money on adequate defence, or even focused offensive campaigns in retaliation for attacks like 9-11 is understandable; what is a hard-to-find logic is the spending of money for unnecessary aggression, on the farfetched speculation of possible attacks (which were disproved) when real people are dying because they don’t have enough money to take care of themselves.
And then there are the quality-of-life issues as well. I watched in the news recently that one foster care facility supporting over one hundred children was forced to close because it could not afford the $25 million needed to run it for the next three years. The daily cost of the Iraq war is estimated at $720 million per day, according to an article in the Washington Post; that’s enough to run about 30 foster homes for three years. And to bring the cost closer to home, consider that three F-22 Raptor fighter planes, at $143 million each, are worth Guyana’s entire 2010 budget, with some spare change left over.
While I am not advocating the US wantonly spending its money on Guyana, consider how much of the money wasted in the war could have been used in ensuring social change abroad, particularly in communities that breed terrorism precisely because of American aggression. That is the topic of the second part of this column.