Dear President Obama,
I hate to tell you this, but I think you’ve jumped the shark. 2012 to get out of Iraq? 35,000 ~ 50,000 troops after the drawdown in 2010? 17,000 new troops to Afghanistan?
Perhaps a history lesson is in order. If you recall, President Johnson escalated troop levels in Vietnam in 1965 with the big buildup coming in 1967~1968. The final number of American boots on the ground over there was over a million at the height of the war. We bombed the hell out of them. We decimated them in February, 1968. We defoliated their forests and killed civilians. Vietnam was costing the United States $2 billion a month. We were kicking ass and taking names. And yet we did not ‘win’ that war. For me, Vietnam will be forever known as the Johnson/Nixon war.
We didn't have an exit plan for Vietnam either.
I must digress for a moment. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 1,440 minutes in a day and 365 days in a year. If you multiply those numbers together, you’ll see there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Let’s play with those numbers.
If the military budget is $1 trillion dollars a year, we are spending $31,709 per second to keep the war machine (and M-I-C) engaged. If the military budget is ‘only’ $500 billion a year, we are spending $15,854 per second to keep the war machine (and M-I-C) engaged.
By now some of your folks at DoD have had a look at the ‘defense’ budget under dubya. You know about the $355 million dollar F-22s and the $5.3 billion dollar Zumwalt destroyers. You know about the $1 million dollar fancy jeep and mortar on wheels (ITV) that fits in the $68 million dollar MV-22 Osprey. You know about the $6.3 billion dollar USS George H. W. Bush. You know that the new Ford-class aircraft carriers are going to cost at least $11 billion dollars. You know about the two $2.5 billion dollar submarines we build each and every year.
You know the occupations are costing us at least $12 billion a month. And yet you continue with them. In your campaign you said we would be out of Iraq in 16 months. 3 more months are no big deal, unless you are unlucky enough to get wounded or dead in those three months.
As of this morning 4,252 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq and 660 American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan for a grand total of 4,912 dead Americans in the invasions and occupations of those two countries.
Can we set some sort of a cap on this waste? Can we start withdrawing after 5,000 American soldiers are killed in Iraq and Afghanistan? 6,000? Can we stop spending 15 (or $31) grand a second to _____?
Thanks for your time,
unhappycamper
