Reports War Costs Pierre Tristam/Candide’s Notebooks, March 28, 2007
It's among the most contentious points of the ongoing wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on "terror" and where- and what-have you: How much has actually been spent and wasted? Here are the definitive reports.
Keep in mind: neither includes the $122 billion appropriation being debated now, which would bring total costs up to $600 billion. Keep in mind, too, that most of these figures were not included in the Pentagon's annual budget requests, and that the actual costs of the wars are much higher because they don't reflect spending by the Pentagon out of those separate accounts. Nor do they reflect other collateral costs, such as the billions in additional burdens carried by Veterans Affairs, and of course the untold billions accumulating in social services budgets once the soldiers, their use to the military over with, are released bac to the civilian population, where a third of the soldiers will experience mental health problems that will reverberate well beyond their VA treatment, and where those 25,000-odd wounded soldiers' lives will be equally affected in lost opportunities, lost wages, broken families and so on. The reverberations are endless. The $600 billion figure is, in the end, a shadow of reality. Still, it's necessary to start with the absolutely factual and despair from there.
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
