Military-Industrial Spending v. Media and Congressional Myopia

With the direct costs of the Iraq War set to run over $800 billion in 2009----$3.5 billion a week/ $180 billion a year----Tomdispatch and Chalmers Johnson remind us that while singularly focusing on a $700 billion Wall Street bailout, the derelict mainstream media, with silent knee-jerk complicity, have allowed an absurdly enormous and wasteful military budget to pass through Congress with nary a word (Really? For 2009, a $612 billion defense authorization bill plus guaranteed additional discretionary appropriations and no serious mention?). THAT'S A WHOPPING $100 BILLION DIFFERENCE from the bailout! And yet, there's no outrage over the indirect (or true) costs of our voluntary, 21st Century "splendid little war" either, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to be $1-2 trillion. More inclusive estimates accounting for the many costly externalities associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq measure it closer to $4-$5 trillion (Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes). To put these gargantuan numbers in context:

Stiglitz and Bilmes list what even one of these trillions could have paid for: 8 million housing units, or 15 million public school teachers, or health care for 530 million children for a year, or scholarships to university for 43 million students. Three trillion could have fixed America's social security problem for half a century.

So doing the math: Divide one Iraq War of $1-5 trillion by Wall Street bailouts at $700 billion a pop, and, "we're talking somewhere between one-and-a-half and seven bailouts-worth of taxpayer dollars flowing into the morass of disaster, corruption, and carnage in Iraq."*

Moreover, one of the worst parts about the incomprehensibly bloated defense budget according to Winslow Wheeler, a Republican, who for 31 years was a member of the Senate and the General Accounting Office on military expenditures:

America's defense budget is now larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any point since the end of World War II, and yet our Army has fewer combat brigades than at any point in that period; our Navy has fewer combat ships; and the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft. Our major equipment inventories for these major forces are older on average than any point since 1946 ---or in some cases, in our entire history.

Interestingly, notwithstanding these quantity/quality issues and the absence of an existential threat of Soviet Cold War Era magnitude, the U.S. Government (no surprise there) and mainstream media apparently feel these expenditures justified without serious mention: Even in the midst, as we are told, of an imminent, catastrophic financial disaster!

But here we can see these two related events loosely linked as The Daily Show brilliantly draws a parallel between the dire language used to sell the Iraq Invasion and the currently proposed corporate-statist (or is it a "corporate-socialist"?) bailout:



In spite of all this gloomy foreboding, and inspirited by that exceptionally-American Divine Light of Freedom, Nature's god-given, democratically dubious and ineffectual right to defer to----"The Experts!"----I now faithfully invoke those who just some 5-6 years ago, had it in mind to save our collective asses from something big. No really----big like the specter of Iraq! If the past be any indication of the future, then their ironically sanguine divinations in contrast with today's apocalyptic economic forecasts may give us a sense of the collective pool of wisdom in which today's heroic catastrophists may be diving (Or it might just simply provide us with a chuckle). Here are just a few examples from The Institute of Expertology's second compendium, Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won The War In Iraq, a resource that everyone should have by their bedside (or toilet at least):

• I believe...that the Iraqi people will, in fact, greet us as liberators.---Senator John McCain, NBC News Today, March 20, 2003
  

• This conflict is going to be…relatively short.---Senator McCain, interview on Meet the Press, March 23, 2003
  

• The likely economic effects [of the war in Iraq] would be relatively small...Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits.---Lawrence Lindsey, White House Economic Advisor, September 16, 2002
  

• It is unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions of dollars.---Kenneth M. Pollack, former Director for Persian Gulf Affairs, U.S. National Security Council, September 2002
  

• This is $1.7 billion...in terms of the American taxpayers' contribution...We have no plans for any further-on funding for this.---Andrew Natsios, appointed by the Bush Administration to run USAID, on Ted Koppel's Nightline, April 23, 2003

• The United States is committed to helping Iraq recover from the conflict, but Iraq will not require sustained aid.---Mitch Daniels, Director, White House Office of Management and Budget, April 21, 2003
  

To be undoubtedly continued...

*With regard to the corruption mentioned above, here's one component of it:

• $19.3bn---The amount Halliburton has received in single-source contracts for work in Iraq.
  
  

...And also these other disconcerting facts:

• $138---The amount paid by every US household every month towards the current operating costs of the war.
  


• $25bn---The annual cost to the US of the rising price of oil, itself a consequence of the war.
  


• $3 trillion---A conservative estimate of the true cost - to America alone - of Bush's Iraq adventure. The rest of the world, including Britain, will shoulder about the same amount again.
  


• $5bn---Cost of 10 days' fighting in Iraq.
  


• $1 trillion---The interest America will have paid by 2017 on the money borrowed to finance the war.
  


• 3%---The average drop in income of 13 African countries - a direct result of the rise in oil prices. This drop has more than offset the recent increase in foreign aid to Africa.
  
  

(All statistics quoted from Ada Edemariam, "The True Cost of War," http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/28/iraq.afghanistan)