The Cost of US Security 456
Hugh Pickens writes "The Atlantic reports that as we mark Osama bin Laden's death, what's striking is how much he cost our nation and how little we've gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the US at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down. 'What do we have to show for that tab,' ask Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley. 'Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden's terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt.' In 2004 bin Laden explicitly compared the US fight to the Afghan incursion that helped bankrupt the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 'We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,' said bin Laden, adding that that every dollar spent by al-Qaida in attacking the US has cost Washington $1m in economic fallout and military spending."
as said before here many times (Score:5, Insightful)
when terrorism makes us become something we are not then terrorism has won - we are less free and less wealthy
We Won't Negotiate With Terrorists (Score:5, Insightful)
But we'll spend trillions of dollars and radically change our society to 'deal' with them.
Yay we "won" (Score:5, Insightful)
Bin Laden was right (Score:3, Insightful)
Hold your Troll/Flamebait mods, I'm not advocating we do away with the treaties that restrict us, I'm merely stating a fact. The face of war has changed and conventional warfare is a thing of the past.
Just Another Political Tyrade (Score:5, Insightful)
We all die someday, its terrible. I am related to people who have been physically been harmed by extremist. And you know what. FUCK THE EXTREMIST. Who gives a shit! Its time our society collectively grabs its balls, puts in work, fires to dumbfucking politicians, and accepts collateral damage at being a successful capitalistic country. Yes there exist corporate corruption in the pockets of government. Yes we get screwed by this and that. But fight for what you believe in and research the facts and fuck all the bullshit. Next time you go out, have a conversation with somebody. Mention to them the falling intelligence levels of the country, the deficit spending, the ridiculous wars, the stupid bigotry. Make people see how ignorant and irrational the country as a whole is acting. If enough people talk about it, it will become the subconscious mind-set of the whole. Anything is better than this Lifetime movie induced coma culture suckling away at the 5'o'clock news and twitter and Facebook.
Last time I was at the DMV, an older gentlemen casually said to me "worlds' fallin to shit, ain't", I said yeah and this and that, and he said "so what is your generation doing about it?"
We don't need some stupid violent revolution or anything like that, but an evolution in the way we think about the sustainable of our race. If we are doomed to be Matrix like beings stuck in vats for our protection while some masters sit in a panoptican keeping everybody's nutrients levels up and fear levels low, well, lets go ahead and start that private space industry funding to Titan's moons.
As I say this I just finished a letter to my representative Jamie Boles (NC) regarding him balking at people having legally permitted concealed weapons in restaurants, and his stalling tactics in regards to HB1XX. Take a stand on what you feel is right, and let these fuckers know your watching them. We just have to stop talking amongst ourselves and start reaching out to others who aren't in our little mental circle jerk in all these forums.
For the TLDR crowd: longwinded guy says some political shit, herp derp nub aids
Re:as said before here many times (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the issue with that is that terrorists don't fulfill any kind of objective by "winning" that way.
Bin Laden was not the Joker. He didn't live specifically to cause chaos for chaos' sake, nor was he a "watch the world burn" kinda guy. He had goals, even if they were poorly thought out and immorally executed ones. Same goes for anyone else who could reasonably be labelled a "terrorist".
You can't say "If we give up our freedoms, the terrorists win" because no terrorist organization that I am aware of specifically wants you to give your own government more power. It's not an objective they can check off on a list. They don't benefit. They might gloat, granted, but whatever possessed them to resort to mass murder in the first place isn't advanced by the erosion of civil liberties in the name of imagined security.
Besides, it shouldn't be about "winning". You can win the war on terror - what would the victory conditions be? The complete eradication of every terrorist everywhere? Good luck with that. While we're wishing, lets hope for the complete eradication of all disease while we're at it. The terrorists have by and large set such unrealistic goals for themselves that they can't win either. Since neither side can ever claim to have met their objectives, how can either ever hope to win?
The issue at hand ought to be prevention of attacks by reasonable and just means. Keep them from hurting innocents, without depriving those same innocents of liberty. This isn't a complicated concept, and it's a lot better than some nebulous war on "terror" as if terror were a nation state that could be conquered or subdued.
Gains (Score:4, Insightful)
I once had to get my car repaired. After I was done, I was just in the same position I was in before the car broke down in the first place. I had paid money, and I had gained nothing!
Seriously, this is nonsense. Killing bin Laden isn't a gain over there being no bin Laden; it's a gain over him being there but staying alive and in charge. Wars are always expensive; we don't fight them because they produce gains, we fight them so that we can stay in the same place--it's a gain over not being able to stay in the same place, but wars always sucked, and they always will. And the article is really reaching to point out things like the economic boom caused by World War II. We didn't fight World War II to cause an economic boom, and not having one certainly wouldn't mean we shouldn't have fought it.
Contrarian Opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
Those who know me personally or know my online record know that I'm one of the biggest deficit and debt hawks around, but I'll provide a contrarian opinion of sorts in this debate. It's not just the hunt for Bin Laden that cost us $3 trillion in this war on terrorism. If tracking down and eliminating Bin Laden was the only thing we spent that money and the rest of our treasure on (most importantly precious American lives), then that would be an unmitigated disaster. But it's obviously farcical and disingenuous to make that claim because killing Bin Laden wasn't the only accomplishment. We took away the safe haven Al Qaeda had in Afghanistan, and then, like it or lump it, we removed a vile dictator named Saddam Hussein and liberated Iraq. Now with the "Arab Spring" setting the Middle East ablaze, we have at least one marginal beachhead Arab state in a semi-stable, semi-functional, semi-democratic Iraq. It's also important to recognize that at the very least we have killed a lot of terrorists and would-be terrorist radicals who otherwise would have been left to plan attacks against us in the future.
Was it necessary to fight these wars? It's an arguable point. At the very least they weren't a total waste, but their efficacy, efficiency and opportunity costs can and should be examined. Did these wars do their part to massively increase our indebtedness? Absolutely they did, but not solely - they were coupled with out-of-control, unconstitutional Entitlements and bloated federal bureaucracies. (It must also be said that national security and national defense are responsibilities of the federal government under the Constitution, whereas the vast majority of Congress' other expenditures are unconstitutional and only permitted because of the post-FDR-New-Deal perversion of the Constitution that Americans have complacently allowed to remain and grow for 80 years.) But to paint the wars as caricatures, which is what is done when people say we spent $3 trillion killing Bin Laden, is at best satire and at worst historical revisionist propaganda.
Re:Cost of security but what did we gain? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a small amount of American's who have gotten incredibly rich off all of this as well.
I wonder if they are going to be assisting their fellow citizens in need of food, shelter & work in the coming years while they live off the profits of war.
More then likely though they will be on MTV's My Sweet 16th throwing a 100,000K party for their little angel instead.
Re:Just Another Political Tyrade (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a country quick to fear and quick to act. I have zero fear of terrorist bombs when I'm on a plane. You have a better chance being raped by ET than dying in a terrorist attack on a plane. But, OBL made a great boogie man, and when we've got a political system set up to funnel tax revenue to Corporate America at the drop of a hat, you better believe they're going to keep people afraid.
This is why Osama is laughing from his grave (Score:5, Insightful)
All he wanted was to cripple us. And where he failed, we did it to ourselves. So ultimately, he won. When a suicide bomber walks into a populated area he knows he is going to die - he just hopes that he can take out at as many people as possible in the process.
Lets put these numbers into perspective:
Osama Bin Laden's estimated damage: $3 trillion
Bill Gates net worth: $56 billion
Apple's market capitalization: $308 billion
2010 stimulus bill: $787 billion
So Bin laden and the resulting spiral of stupidity did more economic damage to the US than Bill Gates + Apple + the economic stimulus put together. From Bin Laden's perspective, our loss is his gain. That means he died the wealthiest most powerful human being on the planet. All because he fooled America into it's own economic death spiral. History will look back on this time as a time when America nearly destroyed itself.
This is like one flea taking down the entire dog because it scratched itself to death.
Re:as said before here many times (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't say "If we give up our freedoms, the terrorists win" because no terrorist organization that I am aware of specifically wants you to give your own government more power. It's not an objective they can check off on a list. They don't benefit. They might gloat, granted, but whatever possessed them to resort to mass murder in the first place isn't advanced by the erosion of civil liberties in the name of imagined security.
Sure it is. Our liberties are what make us. If we continue on this path of eroding them, it will literally destroy America, which is what the terrorists want.
We so often defend liberty without explaining why it is that we do, because it was so well established so long ago that freedom is superior to the alternative, but we do so at the risk of forgetting the why. Liberty is the right to question and challenge the government, which absolutely necessary to prevent corruption and tyranny. Privacy allows dissenters to build a movement without the knowledge of those who would suppress it. The evils these rights are designed to prevent are very real. Take them away and you open Pandora's box, and it becomes only a matter of time before those evils manifest. A despot will destroy his country in ways that a terrorist can only dream.
Re:as said before here many times (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, but I think you're missing the point.
"The terrorists" are not some chaotic evil cartoon villains. They have goals and aspirations. They have a vision of the future where they've "won", however unrealistic and unlikely that vision happens to be. Those visions are not of a totalitarian state replacing the United States. If anything, that outcome is worse for them than what they have now (after all, an Orwellian state might break out the nukes in response to a terror attack), and they're probably capable of figuring this out on their own.
There is not, and has never been, a meeting of terrorist leaders where they schemed to destroy your civil liberties by scaring you into implementing dictatorial "security" measures. How idiotic a plan would that be? "Oh gee, lets terrorize them until they go Orwellian, that'll show those western devils!" Nobody outside of fiction goes to such lengths to accomplish so little to their own benefit.
You're "the enemy" to them regardless of whether you're free or not.
Re:If We Hadn't Had Terrorists, We'd Have Invented (Score:2, Insightful)
The Bush Administration really wanted to have enemies so they could have wars.
Um, you may have missed it, but Bush isn't President anymore. It's Obama now - the guy who you rubes thought would end all these wars and such.
Re:If We Hadn't Had Terrorists, We'd Have Invented (Score:4, Insightful)
The Bush Administration really wanted to have enemies so they could have wars.
Um, you may have missed it, but Bush isn't President anymore. It's Obama now - the guy who you rubes thought would end all these wars and such.
Ah yes... dunno why he hasn't. I've seen all the magical and seemingly impossible things that "The Easy Button" can do while watching all those Staples commercials.
Re:We Won't Negotiate With Terrorists (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no profit in peace. There will always be a (invented) bogeyman to carry on the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ war machine.
Small problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Iraq had nothing to do with Osama.
That wasn't a Contrarian Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a contrarian opinion. It's nothing but a collection of the usual bile.
"vile dictator named Saddam Hussein"
You do remember that we CREATED him? We (the US) put him in power and provided the weapons he used to fight against Iran, against his own people and eventually against us.
I'm all for deficit reduction,et al.. But I really wonder when these self-declared "conservatives" will wake up and realize that all the preaching in the world isn't going to change anything. You can rail against "entitlement" programs and bureaucracies until you're blue in the face, but I guarantee you wouldn't want to live without them. Might I point out that the money we spent on Iraq is enough to permanently fix social security?
I assume you're not old enough for Social Security, but I bet your parents are and claimed it. Since you're using your computer and posting to a website, you've benefited from the FCC and the DoEnergy. If you drove on any US highway or ridden on an airplane, you've benefited from the DOT. I assume you were educated in the US,probably attended college and probably used at least some amount of student loans to pay for it. You can thank the DoEducation for that.
If you really want to change something, why don't you take the time to actually learn what all of these agencies do. Instead of being spoon fed by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin, take the time to do the research. Then, you can make some intelligent arguments about how to improve the system. For all the rhetoric, the "conservative" movement is nothing more then the same old crap in a different wrapper. Reagan raided SS and filled it with bonds to finance his deficit spending. The Bush's both wanted to raid it entirely and give it to their wall-street buddies in the form of "private accounts." The only people that would have benefited from that are the investment bankers. I think we've given them enough handouts already.
So, back to my original point: Unless you have a better proposal that's well thought-out and actually implementable, you have no standing.
If all you can say is that we should do away with all of it, you've only demonstrated your own ignorance.
Re:as said before here many times (Score:3, Insightful)
Well said. Unfortunately the Cartoon World is the one in which most of us live, so the moronic "they hate us for our freedom" narrative always gets good traction here.
Actually, "they hate us for our freedom" is not too far from the truth. Everyone here is playing coy when talking about the goals of terrorists. Of course the terrorists don't care if TSA is feeling up our kids or the government is asking for ID to fly. That's not the freedom they are after.
Sorry, but the goal of "terrorists" is an worldwide Caliphate, or Islamic state.
So govern between the people by that which God has revealed (Islam), and follow not their vain desires, beware of them in case they seduce you from just some part of that which God has revealed to you
—[Qur'an 004:049
It's not our Bill of Rights that they hate, it's our freedom or religion and/or freedom FROM religion. It starts with wanting us out of their "holy land" (Saudi Arabia), which then expands to the entire Mid-East, the Africa, Europe, Asia, and finally the Americas.
Time [time.com] Magazine can explain it better than I can:
After the infidels have been expelled from the land of Islam, bin Laden, like other Islamic radicals, foresees the overthrow of current regimes across the Muslim world and the establishment of one united government strictly enforcing Shari'a, or Islamic law. This vision harks back to the age of the caliphs, the successors to Muhammad who ruled Islam's domain from the 7th century to the 13th. What might a caliphate look like today? In bin Laden's view, it would look something like the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which he has praised as "among the keenest to fulfill [Allah's] laws." Bin Laden may imagine himself to be a potential new caliph. One of the titles he uses is "emir," which means ruler. However, he swears allegiance to (and thereby ranks himself below) the Taliban ruler, Mullah Mohammed Omar, so whatever political ambitions bin Laden may have are not yet on display. ...
But for bin Laden, the game is not as simple as taking Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Says Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council staff member now writing a book on religious terror: "He is looking for a world in which Islam regains the dominant role, and naturally that would include oil and nukes. But to say it's about oil and nukes suggests it's not a metaphysical struggle, which it is for him. He thinks this is a big moral battle in which he's got Allah's sanction to attack the West." In a 1996 proclamation, bin Laden asked, "O Lord, shatter their gathering, divide them among themselves, shake the earth under their feet and give us control over them."
They don't hate us because we have freedoms. They hate us because we are currently free from them. So it would seem that "they hate us for our freedom" is not so moronic after all.
Re:Bin Laden was right (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we must follow the rules of war, our costs/losses are going to be exponentially higher.
I don't recall those rules stating that you must go to war.
Many countries go through worse and choose not to go to war.
Perhaps Bin Laden didn't cost the US trillions. Perhaps the ego and vanity of a nation did.
Re:Just Another Political Tyrade (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what? I have never even seen a gun in public. The US has a fascination with violence and revenge.
The reason you have such social problems is lack of a proper health care and Social security system.
You wont be allowed to carry a gun here at all. I feel very sorry that you live in a place so dangerous, and violent you need to carry a gun.
Face it the whole gun thing is, after ignoring the pathetic "reasons" overcompensation, just like the big SUV's.
Still your absurd claims abut guns making anyone safer amuse the civilised world.
Re:as said before here many times (Score:5, Insightful)
al Qaida doesn't want us to "erode our freedoms" or "literally destroy America." They want us out of the Middle East. Whatever you've heard, they don't hate us for our freedoms. They don't give a fuck about our freedoms.
Re:Just Another Political Tyrade (Score:2, Insightful)
Meanwhile, you have much fewer personal liberties because you trade it for things like a "proper health care and social security system." That's fine, but stop fooling yourself into thinking that you somehow have it better - you've traded bad for good and good for bad just like we have, just in a different balance.
But your belief that your particular level of trading liberty for safety is more "civilized" is truly precious.
Re:Isn't this how the USSR ended? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, you better check your history. The USA certainly did not "beat" the USSR. The USSR collapsed, mostly from within. Why do you think it is referred to as the "collapse of the Soviet Union"?
Now, you could say the USA outlasted the USSR and that would be factually correct, but saying the USA beat the USSR is factually inaccurate on so many levels.
Re:That wasn't a Contrarian Opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny how the same people who claim they don't have two quarters to scrape together when they hear that the citizens need health care and jobs can suddenly find an extra half a trillion to wage a war. Of course when the soldiers come home broken after the war, the funds promptly dry up again.
They found plenty to bail out the banks, but can't seem to find any to bail out homeowners (even though that would have also bailed out the banks).
Dictatorship simplifies takeover (Score:5, Insightful)
For Al Queda, the US reverting to Christian fundamentalism is a good thing, because the power structure of Christian fundamentalism is similar to fundamentalist Islam, and so it is easier to take over from within. It is exactly the same mechanism by which German communists were among the most likely to become fanatical Nazis - people who are already fanatics are ripe for conversion to a different brand of fanaticism.
Re:as said before here many times (Score:5, Insightful)
"they hate us for our freedom" is actually true.
Specifically, the disgraceful and hypocritical double standard that Americans have about freedom and the effort they put into suppressing the freedom of others.
So why is it that Americans think that freedoms are theirs and no-one else's?
Re:as said before here many times (Score:5, Insightful)
All the retoric (from the terrorists themselves) aside, what they really hate is being fucked by the West.
If Israeli rockets were not hitting housing blocks, if the US did not install dictators to give them a good price on oil, if we did not vilify them every step of they way, if they did not live squalid lives while we wallow in luxury based on their natural resources, etc. etc.
Of course religion plays a role here. It functions as a rallying cry. And comfort in your desperation over the non-existent chances of any true success (world caliphate? noone believes that?) and necessary suicide tactics. But mostly, it plays the role of lumping all those disparate grievances together, so they seem to have been perpetrated on the same "us".
The perfect solution is to go back thirty years and not kill and steal. In thirty years, someone will say the same about some new group out for revenge for the shit we are doing now. There is no solution now - but it is never too late to start thinking ahead...
Re:as said before here many times (Score:4, Insightful)
Well they do hate us for our freedom. Granted this was a European paper but remember the reaction when that carton of Mohammad was published? Also Bin Laden stated he objected to our culture and called us infidels. Maybe his immediate plans were for the middle east but Its short silly to think he would not impose an Islamist government on the entire world if he could have, and simply killed some other groups like Jewish people.
So yes I do think the they hate our freedom narrative, while overly simplistic is not incorrect.
Re:as said before here many times (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh bullshit. They didn't start all this because they wanted a Caliphate. That is utter crap. They hate us because we put American boots on the ground in their holy land. They hate us because we blindly support Israel. They hate us because we are constantly meddling in their region of the world where we don't belong.
I'm not sympathetic to them, nor do I agree with their response, but US foreign policy has caused this hatred, not some desire for terrorists to take away our freedom. If we keep shitting on them then we shouldn't be surprised if more of them hate us and turn against us.