A million dollars here, a billion dollars there

This blog has previously dealt with the Bush budget proposal for further funding, in the billions of dollars, for the Iraq War.

Columnist Eric Margolis, writing in the Toronto Sun, reflects on how all those millions of dollars which have been committed to the USA's wars in the Middle East have impacted on America and where all that money seems to have really ended up:

“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money,” famously quipped U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen back in the 1960s.

Our minds boggled last week at U.S. government estimates that President George W. Bush’s so-called “war on terror” (including Afghanistan and Iraq) will cost at least $690 billion US by next year. That’s more than the total cost of World War I, Korea, or Vietnam, and second only to World War II’s $2 trillion.

This means that by 2008, Bush’s wars in the Muslim world will have cost each American man, woman and child $2,300.

Defeat looms in Iraq; Afghanistan is headed that way. And now U.S. intelligence reports al-Qaida is stronger than ever. Osama Bin Laden, who said the only way to expel U.S. influence from the Muslim world was to bleed the U.S. financially, must be beaming."

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