Excerpt: "Although the war has been pretty much ignored by cable news and much of the rest of the mainstream media, apparently the American people have a different view. Around the country, local papers and television stations as well as NPR told the story of its human cost in interviews with survivors of dead servicemen and servicewomen and with stories about the wounded survivors."
A soldier stands guard outside an Iraqi brick factory, 05/05/05. (photo: Staff Sgt. Russell Klika/US Army)
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The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond
Sep 5, 2010 – Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed ...
The key policy articulated in Cheney's Defense Strategy of the 1990s (when he as Bush I's Sec Def) was a move to a "force based US foreign policy." Don't deal with nations in negotiations -- war must be the first move. Preventative wars.
It is this policy that needs to be changed. It needs to be debated openly. The US has a force based foreign policy now. A lot of the force is covert -- CIA and Pentagon Special Ops. The use of drones is growing. Pulling 33k soldiers out of Afghanistan is a meaningless gesture. Obama needs to announce a 180 degree turn from the force based foreign policy. But in his 2010 National Defense Strategy doctrine, he re-affirmed it although his language was much softer than Bush's. He stopped using the terms war and force and instead used "overseas contingency operations." We were not fooled. We've all read Orwell and we understand political speech. We also know to judge politicians by what they do and not what they say.
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