America: Hooked on War and Getting Poorer

With record foreclosures and child poverty at a shameful level, can we really afford to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq for 10 years?

I hallucinate easily, a hangover from time spent in an acid-rock commune in London in the fevered 60s. Most evenings when I switch on the television 6.30 news with its now cliched pictures of deep sea oil spurting from BP's pipe rupture, I see not bleeding sludge but human blood surging up into the Gulf of Mexico.

I've learned to trust my visions as metaphors for reality. The same news programmes, often as a dutiful throwaway item, will show a jerky fragment of Afghan combat accompanied by the usual pulse-pounding handheld shots of snipers amid roadside bomb explosions, preferably in fiery balls. My delusional mind converts this footage into a phantasmagoria where our M60 machine guns are shooting ammunition belts full of $1,000 bills.

Blood, oil, bullets … and cash.

Why is nobody talking about the Afghanistan adventure as a cause of our plunging recession? Or at least citing the 30-year-old endless war as a major contributory factor in wasting our money to "nation-build" in the Hindu Kush while our own country falls to pieces on food stamps, foreclosures and child poverty – one in five kids – that would put the world's poorest nations to shame?

Iraq was George Bush's war. But, as Republican party chairman Michael Steele correctly says, "Afghanistan is Obama's war of choice", and a losing proposition. Historically, Bush and Dick Cheney merely toyed with Afghanistan while visiting shock and awe on Iraq. But President Obama is really, really serious about it. He told us so on his campaign trail, but most of us refused to believe him. We told ourselves: oh, he's a closet pacifist, or he'll somehow find a way out of the impasse, thus sealing a devil's pact with our own consciences.

Obama's "way out" is to dig deeper in so that he'll be able to get out, it's said. Where have we heard that before? Exit strategy, my foot. Obama is a willing prisoner of his generals, the latest four-star foot-in-mouther being General George Casey, army chief of staff, who a few days ago confessed to CBS News that the US could face another "decade or so" of persistent conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. (He then fudged it, but the cat was out of the bag.)

Our Afghanistan war, which began in 1980 under the Democrats (by weaponising Afghan resistance to the Soviets), and is now truly a bipartisan war, is as bankrupt as our economy. No connection? None that I can hear from Republicans or Democrats and the "liberal base". The war without purpose or common sense is simply a given, like the weather. Other than a few lonely members of Congress, like Florida's Alan Grayson (who introduced a bill titled "The War Is Making You Poor"), the antiwar Texas libertarian Ron Paul and Illinois's Tim Johnson, hardly anybody in public life dares to make a connection between teachers' pink slips, personal bankruptcies (6,000 a day now), our rotting infrastructure, lengthening queues at unemployment offices, child poverty … and the war. Source