Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Cashing in the War Dividend (Jo Comerford)TomDispatch has a new piece by Jo Comerford, director of the National Priorities Project. See below for Tom's introduction to the piece.Comerford also appears in one part of a six-part video series from Brave New Films, Rethink Afghanistan. Part Three, which features Comerford and also Linda Bilmes (who co-wrote The Three Trillion Dollar War with Joseph Stiglitz), addresses the costs of the war in Afghanistan. Both Comerford's article and the video series go well with Tom's own piece Who's Next?: Lessons from the Long War and a Blowback World, which argues that the "Long War" (the term members of the Bush administration wanted to give to the global war on terror) is what the United States has already been fighting in the Middle East for the past 30-odd years. —cs If you want a picture of how Washington deals with American war-making today, check out a moment from NBC's October 11th "Meet the Press." David Gregory, the show's moderator, is conducting a round-table discussion with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Carl Levin, and retired General Barry McCaffrey (one of those generals who now spends his time on television explaining our wars to us). At one point, Gregory asks: "Can we beat the Taliban?" General McCaffrey's reply starts this way: "Well, I, I think in 10 years of $5 billion a month and with a significant front-end security component, we can leave an Afghan national army and police force and a viable government and roads and universities. But it's a time constraint that we can't change things in 18 to 24 months. So I think we got to lower expectations." Now, if you were a normal citizen, you might begin frantically calculating: $5 billion a month... 12 months in a year... $60 billion a year... times 10 years... $600 billion dollars. If, in fact, the number of U.S. troops or trainers and advisors rises significantly and the U.S. commitment to the war rises as well, this will surely prove a gross underestimate. But leaving that aside, you, the normal, reasonable human being, might at this point say something like: "Hold on, general, $600 billion more dollars? Ten years? And where's that money coming from? And is that really how you want to invest taxpayer dollars -- in another supposedly too-big-to-fail bailout?" Or, of course, you might just jump up and yell, "Have you lost your senses?" But of course this is Washington where such numbers for American war-fighting are so ho-hum, so run-of-the-mill, that none of the other participants even thinks to comment on or question them or stops for a second in wonder. In fact, when McCaffrey is done, here's how Gregory begins his response: "Just with, with very little time left, I want to get to two other issues. The president spoke last night at the Human Rights Campaign dinner and spoke about 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'..." And so it goes in "wartime" Washington. Jo Comerford, a TomDispatch newcomer, runs the National Priorities Project, whose mission is to analyze "complex federal spending data and translate it into easy-to-understand information about how federal tax dollars are spent." Its site even has a "cost of war" counter, constantly twirling as the dollars rise in dizzying fashion. Here, as a numbers cruncher, she makes the most basic point of all: Whoever may be losing in our country, others are cashing in their chips and I'm not just talking about Goldman Sachs. After all, there's also the "war dividend." —Tom Cashing in the War Dividend Read the rest of the article. Read Tom Engelhardt's Who's Next?. Watch Rethink Afghanistan. (Not for the faint of heart.) Labels: Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, Jo Comerford, Joseph Stiglitz, Linda Bilmes, militarism, Tom Engelhardt |