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."
Isn't this how the USSR ended? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone else see this as being very similar to how the USA beat the USSR?
We forced the USSR to spend themselves out of existence. The terrorists are now playing our own game, except against us. Unfortunately, I fear how this will end for the USA if we don't figure out that we can't win this game without changing the rules.
Perhaps we saved one hundred thousand lives (Score:3, Interesting)
too positive (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, Hugh Pickens' summary paints too rosy a picture.
The title, "The Cost of US Security," has the words "cost" and "security" in it.
"Security" implies that the US's four wars since 2001 (I count Pakistan as a war) have some positive correlation with US Security. If anything, they have decreased US security. The second Iraq war happened because Bush got Powell to go to the UN and tell them lies about how Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a security threat. The Pakistan war involves our giving the Pakistani government lots of money so they can work hand in glove with terrorists. What exactly has the Afghanistan war accomplished, other than killing lots of young Americans and putting a corrupt Afghan government in power and allowing it to fake elections?
The word "cost," along with all the dollar figures, encourages us to measure the outcome in terms of money. The outcome should be measured in terms of the destruction of domestic civil liberties, crapping on the constitution, torturing people who didn't do anything wrong, crippling and killing teenage Americans, and killing innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Iraq War Wasn't bin Laden's Fault (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, you can blame the WTC and Clinton's cruise missile attacks and to some extent even the Afghanistan* War on bin Laden, but the article also blames him for the costs of Bush's Iraq War, which had nothing to do with him and which cost a lot more than Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein was the kind of corrupt secular dictator bin Laden hated, and American troops based in the Holy Land (that's Saudi Arabia, in this case) were one of the things bin Laden got most upset about.
Bush may have used bin Laden as an excuse, along with "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and "Saddam tried to kill my daddy after my daddy tried to kill Saddam", but the Pentagon was planning the Iraq War from the first week Bush got into office. (See Bamford's book "A Pretext for War" for more details - Cheney, Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, and Cheney's neo-con buddies were all at those early planning meetings. And Iraq was a logical target since Bush 41's war had never really been finished, so the Pentagon should have been doing at least some planning in case the politicians wanted to finish the war.)
* And even the Afghanistan War was mostly an attempt to impose a non-Taliban winner onto the civil war that the Taliban had mostly won, and while they were permitting bin Laden to operate in their country, bombing the place in response to 9/11 was a bit like the Brits bombing the Irish parts of Boston and San Francisco after an IRA bombing in London.
Re:as said before here many times (Score:4, Interesting)
the moronic "they hate us for our freedom" narrative always gets good traction here.
As it should.
They do hate you for your freedom. The only mistake most people make is believing the haters are the bearded brown people on the other side of the world.
Real freedom means being able to choose what you do all day and every day. That's something most wage-slaves dream about all their lives and if they're lucky, experience for a few brief twilight years of retirement. For a while there in the late '90s, after the fall of the iron curtain, people started talking about a "peace dividend". Prosperity was an expectation, and real incomes were high. In the west at least, many people were beginning to buy themselves out of their slavery earlier and earlier. Great for them, but a dangerous path for the capitalist economies.
As we've seen in TFA, the USA has spent $3 trillion on the invasions, but money is conserved almost as surely as mass and energy. All of those trillions have gone from the American public to... somewhere. From the outside, it looks like an unwinnable war was chosen as the most efficient way to pump wealth from workers to private industry; arresting one extremist was just the marketing ploy.
Re:as said before here many times (Score:2, Interesting)