The teabaggers seem to want "fiscal responsibility" but they must have been asleep while the Bush administration and Congress spent over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now any hint of profligacy appears to bother them. Too bad they didn't pay attention eight years ago.
Wasting money on illegal and immoral war is the worst possible way to waste money because it's accompanied by the even greater expense of American blood and the generation of international ill will. A just war is by definition necessary to the preservation of our nation and our liberty and no cost can be too great for such a war declared by Congress as required by our Constition. It should be noted that the Bush administration did not appear especially keen on defending and preserving our Constitution. Bush wiretapped members of Congress (including our own 36th CD Representative Jane Harman) and suspended habeus corpus, among other illegal acts disrepectful to our heritage.
In last month's President's Message I mentioned the harmful effect Bush's squandering has already had on our space program. Conservatives seem to be proud of the dire straits to which they have brought this country because it makes implementing social programs more difficult. What they have actually done, however, is to shoot themselves in their feet, because, as conservatives will admit, a falling tide lowers all boats.
We have been in Afghanistan for over eight years. We did not go in there to build a nation or to "defeat" the Taliban or theocracy. We failed to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. We have already lost, in the same way that we had already lost Vietnam in 1968. There we failed to stop the flow of weapons into Vietnam from Russia and China. That is, we did not seal the borders of Vietnam. Similarly, we did not seal the borders of Afghanistan and Al Qaeda now operates in Pakistan. We did not seal the borders of Iraq nor did we secure the military bases, so the insurgents have weapons and tons of explosives. (480 tons of high explosives went missing from just one unguarded military base in Iraq in 2003, enough to fill 100 large trucks.)
In Vietnam our generals failed us because they did not point out to the President and Congress that failing to seal the borders of Vietnam would cause us to lose the war. We should have been sinking the Russian cargo ships delivering ammunition and tanks to Hanoi via the Haiphong Harbor, but we were afraid of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons. We really had no business fighting a war we didn't have the guts to prosecute properly. It was a horrible mistake from which Bush and Cheney didn't learn, evidently because they had "other priorities."
Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL as it was originally called, later OIF) failed to secure freedom and failed to secure the oil. We have failed in both Iraq and in Afghanistan. We are there for no purpose. Every day we remain is another day of folly, throwing away money and blood. How do we get out of Iraq, the saying goes? Use airplanes. The same for Afghanistan. We are being bled to death, just as Osama Bin Laden foretold. The longer we go along with that folly, the worse for our future. Just leave. Just do it. Let's not continue to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam.
Rick Wagner, member
Vietnam Veterans of America
Chapter 53