Trillions

It was not that long ago that I would use the word trillion as some sort of make believe number that no one could possibly imagine. How far away was the moon? A trillion miles. What was the possibility of me sleeping with Julia Roberts? A trillion to one. On and on it could go, trillion being so hard to imagine that it was an ongoing joke of some sort.

How much has the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost? A little over a trillion dollars.

I remember some hippy advertising campaign where the world would be perfect when teachers were paid more money and the air force had to hold bake sales. The point was never lost and our priorities have not changed. Just this week the congress passed another funding bill for the military, while cutting unemployment benefits for out of work Americans. Sometimes people say pithy things like "elections have consequences" but I am not sure they do.

This country is controlled by big business, whether it is the massive financial institutions that can control congress with gifts and bribes, or the oil companies who do the same, or the military bomb and plane builders who get money from congress and always send back about 10 percent to keep the cash flowing. All the while, many good people continually say "something must be done."

Of course, there are other good people who quite like how things are going. War has always been good for this country, ask FDR. The problem with an economy that relies on the construction and building of war machines is that we are often forced to use them just to justify their costs.

I was recently talking to a very conservative friend of mine who said that we had to go to war in Afghanistan because of 9-11 and that he too was kind of upset about Iraq because that has proven to be just insanity. My line of reasoning in regards to 9-11 shocked my conservative friend. I told him that at the time of the attacks my sense was, find out who is responsible, find out where they are and bomb the living fuck out of them, even tossing a nuke in their front yard. I believe my conservative friends eyes popped out of his head, but my reasoning was this, if you pick on a super power and walk away from it, others will feel like they too can do little knock off operations in the same vein. If we go bat shit crazy every time some country allows terrorists to have a nice warm place to plot their attacks, then very few places on earth will allow terrorists to call it home.

Plus, who really wants to piss off insane bullies with nuclear capabilities? Instead, we did the conventional thing, attack, bomb, soldiers and the like. In the end we have now lost over four thousand soldiers, more every day and one trillion dollars. What have we got out of this? No Osama, no end to threats and plots and even some badly planned attacks and still we fight.

We built up a huge war machine as a way to fend off attacks and intimidate countries and crazies from attacking us. Obviously that worked for countries like Russia and Cuba, but it will not work for individual countryless terrorists and that is who we will probably be dealing with from now on. Sometimes, rarely, but sometimes it pays to be a little crazy. I am not sure if a crazy nuke filled attack would have worked to scare off religious jihadists, but what it would have done is sent the fear of god into the bones of people who quietly plot. It is one thing to plan and carry out a suicide attack, but quite another to know that your singular act of idiocy will lead to invasion, death and punishment from the big bad bully on the world stage.

One trillion dollars is a lot of money. The deaths of so many soldiers is a terrible loss to our country and their families. The Iraq war is a tragedy on so many levels it is almost indescribable at this point. We have yet to bring peace to both countries that we now occupy. We will no doubt pull out and not have gained the upper hand. The loss of money and lives will be for what?