The Best Defence is No Offence

By swoononeone
January 19th, 2006 @ 1:24 PM frustration and venting

I was in awe today at how choppy markets were. The release of the alledged “Bin Laden” tape had quite an effect!!! The so called war on terror was wreaking havoc on the TSE and all world markets.

With talk of our military filling in the gaps left by other countries now exiting Afganistan, Canada’s role doesn’t get any easier. I find the timing of that news a little suspect (the troops are due to leave shortly after the election) but perhaps it was done with keeping it “off the table”.

We do have much to be proud of as far as Canada’s military role as “PEACEKEEPERS”. Just hoping that legacy can be maintained. I agree that those that support more $ for military IF and ONLY IF it is used for relief and peacekeeping efforts. One only has to look south to see the price of making more enemies. Let’s hope who ever does become our government uses their power wisely. The acts of Bin Laden and his followers are apprensible. Hoping Canada will try to walk on firmer higher ground than escalate the costly downward path…

IRAQ WAR - US$234 Billion and counting (not to mention 1,000’s of US of personel and over an estimated million Iraqi’s lives lost - though no counts are formally kept on civilian/Iraq casulties)

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1 Comment so far

  1. abbas halai (unregistered) January 20th, 2006 12:18 pm

    there are other costs of war involved on top of the $234B that the US are quoting. read this article in the international herald tribune as a quick example of how to the war has gone into a cost of over $2 Trillion. yeah read that again. $2 Trillion!

    To quote:

    The direct budgetary costs to the US government of the Iraq war include current and likely future spending on combat and support operations; medical care costs of returning injured veterans, including those with brain injuries (which are more expensive to treat); disability pay; costs of demobilisation; increased capital spending for defence; and interest payments on debt. Looking purely at these direct budgetary costs, they estimate that the total cost of the Iraq war to be in the range of $750 billion to $1.1 trillion, assuming that the US begins to withdraw troops in 2006 and maintains a diminishing presence in Iraq for the next five years.

    But of course these are only part of the costs to the US economy as a whole. There are the indirect or opportunity costs of the war, which include the economic cost of the National Guard and reserve forces, who are not available to do the work they are supposed to (which became starkly evident during the recent floods that affected New Orleans). They also include other economic costs: of military fatalities, of contractor facilities, of the seriously injured, of accelerated depreciation of military hardware.

    However, the macroeconomic costs may even be several times larger. Stiglitz and Bilmer point to at least three major sources of macroeconomic consequences: the increase in the price of oil; the increase in defence expenditures; and the increased insecurity that has followed from the way that the war has been pursued. They suggest that these costs are very large, and possibly even a multiple of the direct and other economic costs. On this basis, they estimate that the total economic costs of the war, including direct costs and macroeconomic costs, lie between $1 and $2 trillion.

    read the article for more or go to any other news article using google news.


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