The commission established to investigate the 9/11 attack determined the terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, was responsible. This commission also determined the annual budget for Al Qaeda to be $30 million. The American people were told that in order to keep them safe from threats like this in the future it was necessary to establish the Department of Homeland Security and launch a war with Afghanistan. A short time later, a war with Iraq began on the pretext of this country harboring weapons of mass destruction. When we add the costs of the DHS, the two wars and a few incidentals like the construction of the billion-dollar embassy in Bagdad, we come up with about $2 trillion. This amount is roughly 6,000 times the cost incurred by Al Qaeda during this same 10-year period. This gross imbalance of the costs incurred by the opposing sides in these conflicts strains credulity. Is it even possible for a government and military to be so inefficient and incompetent to wage war so ineffectually? It is only when viewed from the perspective of the winners that this scenario makes any sense. The winners are not the Afghans or Iraqi people who had their people killed and their countries blown to bits. The winners are not the American people who lost sons and daughters in these senseless wars and mortgaged the future of their grandchildren to pay the costs. We are no safer from the threat of terrorism today than we were a decade ago. The only winners in this scenario are the multinational corporations that produce the products used in war and direct the policies of our government so as to maximize their profits.
Even now as the war in Iraq is declared over and the war in Afghanistan winding down, new battlefronts in Iran, Syria and Mali are being proposed by these global elites that use the same justification: “Making the world safe for democracy!” We have been “making the world safe for democracy” for more than 100 years and are no closer to this elusive goal today than in the beginning. I would argue that our misguided efforts have greatly abetted rather than diminished world violence.
The only way to stop this endless cycle is to vote out of office the senators, congressman and presidents that pander to the policies of the military industrial complex.
Bill Payne
Libby