The War as Investment

[unhappycamper]

The War as Investment
Edward Humes
Posted October 17, 2007 | 04:28 PM (EST)


Imagine you picked up the newspaper one morning and read that the supposedly unbeatable investment fund safeguarding your retirement savings was a pyramid scheme, that the fund managers' preening assurances of low risk were lies, that their investment strategies were colossally flawed, and that your money was gone with nothing to show for it. What would you do? Would you do as the fund managers suggest and send them yet more money, perhaps your child's college savings, hoping for a miracle before the grand jury convened? Or would you run for the exit as fast as you could, salvaging whatever pennies remained?

Not really much of a decision, is it? No one in their right mind would continue investing in a red-ink scheme marred by hubris, error and fraud, would they?

Of course not... Unless that investment is called Iraq, where good money follows bad no matter how dismal the prospectus.

~snip~


And just to be sure we know what we're talking about here, the investment to date has exceeded 3,800 American lives, 200,000 Iraqi lives, and $450 billion (with another $125 billion added for the companion war in Afghanistan). That investment has brought us no measurable returns (except for negative ones) in terms of what should be our bottom line: increased national security, increased energy security, increased economic security.

If that level of investment with nothing to show for it sounds staggering, grab onto something quick: We're on target right now, without any further debate, to double down, and possibly triple down, that investment. That's right: According to current projections by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (widely ignored in media reports about the war), dollar costs of the current Iraq and Afghanistan war plan will rise to somewhere between $1 and $1.4 trillion before the last soldier comes home... ten years from now.

Let's set aside the question of whether the Iraq War can be rightly compared to a pyramid scheme, because even if the war's conception were entirely on the up and up (which most non-delusional Americans now understand it was not), the question still remains: How can this president, this Congress and this country embark on and continue such an immense investment with no serious, rational, informed debate over its costs versus its benefits?


Rest of article at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edward-humes/the-war-as-investment_b_68873.html