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Most Veterans Say America’s Wars Are a Waste. No One’s Listening to Them. | The New Republic

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Most Veterans Say America’s Wars Are a Waste. No One’s Listening to Them. | The New Republic

That’s the main takeaway from the Pew Research Center’s latest rolling poll of U.S. veterans, published Thursday, in which solid majorities of former troops said the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were not worth fighting. The gaps between approval and disapproval were not even close to the poll’s 3.9 percent margin of error; barely a third of veterans considered any of those conflicts worthwhile:

No to war with Iran

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No to war with Iran…💥

Part of being an adult is tolerating and working with awful people that really don’t deserve anything positive for their bad behavior. But often it’s beneficial to work with evil as the costs of addressing evil is often higher than ignoring it.

Iran is an obnoxious bear out in the Middle East that occasionally does terrible things but mostly is content to avoid significant conflict with the United States. The same is true with the United States – the cost of destabilizing the Middle East would be significant to the United States. The most obvious impacts to every day Americans would be greatly escalated energy prices and increased police presence in public places but its unlikely to limited to that. There would be an enormous financial cost to the federal budget, leading to cuts to domestic programs and both American and Iranian lives destroyed along with damaged infrastructure.

With our own country facing significant domestic needs, I believe that should be our focus. Middle Eastern stability is less important now than in decades past with strong United States oil production and no threat of communism any more, but we shouldn’t poke the bear of Iran and unnecessarily upset the balance of power in Iran.

While I didn’t attend today’s protest downtown on the war, I will continue to speak out and will attend future protests. ✊

Financial cost of the Iraq War – Wikipedia

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Financial cost of the Iraq War – Wikipedia

War is very expensive for taxpayers ...

- FY2003 Supplemental: Operation Iraqi Freedom: Passed April 2003; Total $78.5 billion, $54.4 billion Iraq War

- FY2004 Supplemental: Iraq and Afghanistan Ongoing Operations/Reconstruction: Passed November 2003; Total $87.5 billion, $70.6 billion Iraq War

- FY2004 DoD Budget Amendment: $25 billion Emergency Reserve Fund (Iraq Freedom Fund): Passed July 2004, Total $25 billion, $21.5 billion (estimated) Iraq War

- FY2005 Emergency Supplemental: Operations in the War on Terror; Activities in Afghanistan; Tsunami Relief: Passed April 2005, Total $82 billion, $58 billion (estimated) Iraq War

- FY2006 Department of Defense appropriations: Total $50 billion, $40 billion (estimated) Iraq War.

- FY2006 Emergency Supplemental: Operations Global War on Terror; Activities in Iraq & Afghanistan: Passed February 2006, Total $72.4 billion, $60 billion (estimated) Iraq War

- FY2007 Department of Defense appropriations: $70 billion(estimated) for Iraq War-related costs

- FY2007 Emergency Supplemental (proposed) $100 billion

- FY2008 Bush administration has proposed around $190 billion for the Iraq War and Afghanistan

- FY2009 Obama administration has proposed around $130 billion in additional funding for the Iraq War and Afghanistan.

- FY2010 Obama administration proposes around $159.3 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers | The New Republic

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Why the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers | The New Republic

The Afghanistan Papers are, in other words, a bombshell. Yet the report has received scant attention from the broader press. Neither NBC nor ABC covered the investigation in their nightly broadcasts this week. In other outlets, it has been buried beneath breathless reporting on the latest developments in the impeachment saga, Joe Biden’s purported pledge to serve only one term, and world leaders’ pathological envy of a 16-year-old girl.

The relentless news cycle that characterizes Donald Trump’s America surely deserves some blame: This isn’t the first time that a consequential news story has been buried under an avalanche of other news stories. But one major reason that the Afghanistan Papers have received so comparatively little coverage is that everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive. There are no hearings, few press gaggles.

George W. Bush started the Afghanistan War and botched it in plenty of ways, not least by starting another war in Iraq. But Barack Obama, despite his obvious skepticism of the war effort, exacerbated Bush’s mistakes by bowing to the Washington foreign policy blob and authorizing a pointless troop surge. Now, although both Democrats and Donald Trump seem to be on the same page about getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan, there has been little progress with peace talks. The pattern across administrations is that any movement toward resolution is usually met with a slow slide back into the status quo, a.k.a. quagmire.