"Holy fucking Jesus" ...

... was my reaction when I read this:

It's a shame to let accountants spoil the charming romance of war, but sometimes they insist. Recently the Congressional Research Service reported that our military undertakings in Iraq and Afghanistan have marked an important milestone. Together, they have cost more than a trillion dollars.

That doesn't sound like much in the age of TARP, ObamaCare, and LeBron James, but it is. Adjusted for inflation, we have spent more on Iraq and Afghanistan than on any war in our history except World War II. They have cost more in real dollars than the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

But we can only wish we were getting off so lightly. Neither war is over, and neither is going to be soon. The House just approved $37 billion in extra funding to cover this year, and the administration wants another $159 billion for 2011. That won't be the final request.

Worse, the CRS figure is only part of the bill so far. It noted the sum doesn't include the "costs of veterans' benefits, interest on war-related debt, or assistance to allies." All of those will go on after these wars are over, which someday they may be.

Scholars Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia and Linda Bilmes of Harvard published a book in 2008 called The Three Trillion Dollar War, which gives a more realistic estimate. But that, too, is an understatement. They figure that when all long-run costs are factored in, the tab will be at least $5 trillion and could reach $7 trillion, or nearly twice as much as this year's entire federal budget.

And that was two years ago. I asked Bilmes for an update, and she said some obligations, like veterans' medical and disability compensation costs, "have exceeded our earlier projections." Do I hear $8 trillion?

Gentle Jesus on a pedal-powered three-wheeled cycle.

$8,000,000,000,000.00

That's a fucking lot of money, spent on what appear to be one pointlessly won war and one war that will never be won.

Now I know there's a school of thought that says that wars generate economic activity, but the reality of it is that ANY activity channelled through a government has a negative multiplier. A certain amount of any government budget is just wasted on shuffling income from one department to another, and doesn't find it's way back into the real economy, for example.

The "broken windows" fallacy also comes into play here, so for all the money actually spent making weapons and military kit, and paying for VA care, etc., there is an unseen pile of money that could have been spent on many other things.

And eight trillion dollars dished out directly to the citizens of the USA would probably be enough to turn the US back into a massive economic powerhouse, dwarfing China.

Eight fucking trillion dollars.

Fuck.

Apparently ...

... I'm not consistent:

Now let's have some consistency from the libertarian wing, please, before everyone cottons on to how deluded and weird you all are.

According to the purveyors of the Only True Libertarianism, I am not at all consistent, because I didn't immediately leap up and applaud Obamalamadingdong's decision to allow homosexual people to join the military openly.

Ah, consistency! How about this:

Unlike idealists, this old cynic looks at outcomes. I would far rather someone got richer, healthier, lived longer and ultimately became freer through my callous heartlessness, than that they starved because of some idealistic bell-end.

That was in reference to matters economic, but it applies equally to any "ism" or "phobia" - the idea behind the legislation is irrelevant, it's only the outcome that matters.

And Obama is not a dictator. He has to push his "lofty ideal" through the mincer (ho! ho!) of the US Congress and Senate, where it will doubtlessly emerge in a completely different and much more expensive form.

Perhaps when we've had the outcome of less discrimination and it has proven to have no unexpected comebacks against homosexuals in the military, I will stand up and applaud it.

Until then, it's all just a case of fine but empty words.

Perhaps if you go back to 1996 and start reading Tony Blair's speeches you will find many more positive things you can blog about that I ignored or thought were a load of shite.

Oh, and look: all Mr Blair's fine rhetoric has left us where exactly?

And in closing, this:

I'm telling you, folks, this is another Tony Blair we've got here. A thieving bastard hypocrite of the very highest order.

So, my opinion of Obama and his efforts is entirely consistent: he's a man who can talk a fine talk (when he has a teleprompter) but apart from that he's an empty sack of shit who will leave his country in a fucking mess.

This particular piece of legislation, if it ever happens, can easily be just as dreadful as anything Harriet Harman cooks up, despite the noble sentiment.

Is that consistent enough for you?

PS I hadn't even heard about it until you tried to use it as a stick to beat me with. So blame the media for not giving the story enough prominence while you're trying so hard to be consistent.

What a catastrophe!

Disastrous: the Iraq war caused a catastrophic loss of faith in the Labour Party.* This was definitely the most serious consequence of the war.

*Oh, and anywhere between a hundred thousand and a million sand wogs lost their lives. But they don't really matter, because they're not Labour voters.

Shaving Ryan's Privates

Tip of the clown wig to Paul Waugh.

A Short filleting

Iain Martin is rapidly heading for my "daily must-read" list. He savages Claire Short's testimony at the Chilcot enquiry:

I remember a senior Labour defense minister explaining to me bitterly after Iraq that Short’s department was only interested in the army if it was handing out food parcels and being nice to people. Otherwise, they weren’t interested in engaging much with the process. Demanding a properly rigorous curfew and robust military government until civic society could be rebuilt? Not really DFID’s scene. How, like, totally militaristic, man.

Sobering and depressing reading

From the Lovely Trixy.

Gear up for a blood bath in Afghanistan

The fucking nutter with the stutter has opened his fat, flappy yap again:

Gordon Brown provoked surprise this afternoon by announcing that Britain's military presence in Afghanistan would soon be over 10,000, as he took the unusual step of revealing that there were around 500 special forces there.

"Surprise"? "Unusual step"? Talk about a fucking understatement.

Gordoom, you fucking mentalist, you really are entirely unfit to run the country. Why don't you just post all the details of our military operations and plans on the internet where everyone can fucking download them and study them at their leisure? It will make it a lot easier to kill soldiers, reduce demand for money from the military for pesky things like wages and weapons and ammo, less pension funding will be required, it's a win all round.

You fucking stupid moronic cunt-featured cunting IDIOT!

You read it here first, folks!

See? Somebody's listening!

65th time lucky*

Jesus, talk about a death wish!

A British soldier responsible for making safe 64 bombs during five months in Afghanistan, died as he tried to defuse another, it has emerged.

Poor bastard. I can't imagine how mentally tough you have to be to face that, day in and day out.

And what did he die for? So that overweening cockface Gordon "The Snotmuncher" Brown can fellate Obama? To spare the blushes of some fucking faceless bell-end in the State Department or the Foreign Office? For Tony fucking Blair?

What did this incomprehensibly brave man die for?

*I didn't say it was good luck.

Cheaper and more effective

Ross has found a fucking brilliant idea here:

Afghans are known for changing sides back and forth during their long years of war — there is an old saying that “you can rent an Afghan but never buy one” — and battles have often been decided by defections rather than combat.

Paying Taliban foot-soldiers to switch sides could spare US lives and save money, say its advocates. A recent report by the Senate foreign relations committee estimated the Taliban fighting strength at 15,000, of whom only 5% are committed idealogues while 70% fight for money — the so-called $10-a-day Taliban. Doubling this to win them over would cost just $300,000 a day, compared with the $165m a day the United States is spending fighting the war.

Now I did have a minor moral qualm with this. My bourgeois upbringing has an instinctive revulsion about the idea of bribing people. But then I thought about it a bit longer: which collective or individual sponsor of terrorism is going to want to match the US/UK investment in fighting the taliban? We currently spend $165M a day on fighting the Taliban. We could, if we double their current earnings, spend $300K a day on this. In other words, we could fight a year of the Afghan war for a lot less than we spend there per day. So, let's say Islamofascists double up again and we have to double up again. So now we're fighting a year's worth of war for 3 days' worth of current spend. So they double up again and we double up again. We're now fighting a year's worth of war for about 10 days' current spend.

And at this point, if my rudimentary maths is up to it, the $10-a-day Taliban will be earning $320 per day, which isn't a bad fucking deal for a westerner. For an Afghan, that's pretty much millionaire status. They will, collectively, say "fuck you" to the Taliban and start collecting Mercs.

And we can go on doubling and redoubling a fucking lot before it starts to cost us anything like the current costs. Al-Qaeda and their supporters will either go bankrupt or say "fuck it, there's got to be a cheaper way of doing this" and throw in the towel.

And if you combined that with buying the Afghan poppy crop for medical purposes, the Taliban would be pushed out to an irrelevant fringe while everyone else in Afghanistan decided to get rich instead.

The only people who lose out are the neo-con militarists, and frankly, they can go fuck themselves. They've had their fun.

BFPO - go sign

Our MPs. They love taking advantage of the positive feeling the public have towards our Armed Forces but they also have an irritating desire to take money off them.

Sign here to keep the BFPO in mainland Europe.

Originally blogged by The Lovely Trixy.

Spartism

Every so often, I'm reminded of why blogrolled Dave's Part. Although he does occasionally lapse into hilarity-inducing Labour tribalism, every so often he comes up with some serious, thought-provoking goods.

Like this:

OK, DO you want to cheerlead the guys that throw acid in schoolgirls’ faces, or the men who killed dozens of Afghan civilians in an airstrike on two stolen fuel tankers last week? Hopefully, by the time you have finished this post, you will agree with me that such a proposition represents a false counterposition for the left.

Among many other points, was this, something I happen to agree with quite firmly:

Given the welter of conflicting principles on offer, in the nature of the case the majority of the left prefers to base morality on weighing up the consequences of major politic choices. The pro-war left has frequently invoked the introduction of liberal democracy to Afghanistan as good grounds for supporting the war.

We might want to call the idea that liberal democracy can be imposed by force of arms the Fukuyama Fallacy. It has been put to the test, and found wanting, in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

With perhaps the sole historical - but nevertheless partial - exception of Japan, democracy has always arisen either organically or not at all. Few of the pro-war left can look upon the putrid and corrupt vote-rigging government in Kabul with any sense of satisfaction.

I urge you to go read the whole thing, especially if you consider yourself "of the left".

Somewhere beyond appalling

So, let me get this straight: the government send soldiers into war, ill-equipped and without the necessary support. They get injured. There are medical consequences of those injuries. The government is now prepared to compensate the soldier for the injury, but not the consequences of the injury?

How the fuck does that work? Does the fact that someone got hurt in the line of duty, directed by the government, not leave the government with a duty of care? Even if they were properly equipped and protected, these men and women have taken one for the team.

It's not a one-way street, you fucking cunts.

Update: Timmy is pithy as usual.