Yes that is alot of money. Oh, lets see. That money could be better spent maybe here in America, you know, infrastructure, and jobs. HEY DUMBA$$ES, Bring the troops home. Stop terrorising other nations.

Well once again the Dems show us they can waste our money just as well, if not better than the crazy repubs.

Please stop voting and supporting these stupid bastards--they have almost destroyed this nation, or maybe it's already to late. This time vote against both of these corrupt parties, PLEASE!

The War Profiteers and Wall Street Banksters who own our three branches of federal government will never allow these profitable, endless wars for Empire to be ended.

Our political-economic system is a Permanent War Economy. Dismantling the system, including jailing all the war criminals running it and profiting from it, is the only way to stop this insanity.

Tell everyone you know: any politician who votes to continue funding these wars is an enabler of state terrorism and a war criminal who must be thrown out of office. Until a majority of us voters understand this and act on it, nothing will change. Speak out against the insanity everywhere you go.

"Iraq, logistically, is much easier," says Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress. "You get the stuff to Kuwait and just drive it up the road."

When President Obama announced the expansion of the war in Afghanistan I pointed out on this site that nearly every person I had asked to name Afghanistan's seaport answered that they had to consult a map of Afghanistan because they did not know that name!
It was McChrystal clear then and now that the overwhelming majority of our nation does not realize the "Stalingrad-like" nature of the war in Afghanistan which is conducted at the end of an iffy and very expensive supply line. Mr. Korb, you are welcome but approximately one year late.

Cicero: "After victory you have more enemies."

Cicero again: "The sinews of war are infinite money."

Me: "Make wars increasingly profitable to monied interests and you proliferate them and extend them indefinitely."

Me again: "No peace will ever last unless we discard the ideology that engineers war."

Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

James Madison: "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

James Madison again: "The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad."

And again: "War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honours and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle."

And again: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps the most to be dreaded because it compromises and develops the germ of every other."

Thomas Jefferson: "They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property, and lives of their people." [From a letter to President Monroe]

President (and General) Dwight D. Eisenhower: "WE WILL BANKRUPT OURSELVES IN THE VAIN SEARCH FOR ABSOLUTE SECURITY."

Eisenhower again: "How far can you go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"

And again: "Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."

Robin Cook: "There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which Al Qaeda could thrive." [Robin Cook was Britain's Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair who resigned from the British Cabinet to protest the Iraq War]

Albert Einstein: "Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war."

Aldous Huxley: "What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood."

Alexis de Tocqueville: "No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country."

John Adams: "Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war."

John Adams again: "Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak..."

Barbara Bush: "Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths...I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

George Bernard Shaw: "Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance."

George W. Bush: "I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war."

Robert M. LaFollette: "If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another...after the war is on."

Butler Shaffer: "Coercive practices that threaten our neighbor(s) also threaten us."

General Smedley Butler: "There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."

General Smedley Butler again: "My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military."

G. K. Chesterton: "A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over...is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen."

Mark Twain: "The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities."

James Wolcott: "The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself."

Howard Zinn: "How can you make a war on terror if war itself is terrorism?"

John Cory: "War is the cemetery of futures promised."

John Cory again: "War is the tool of small-minded scoundrels who worship the death of others on the altar of their greed."

John Lennon: "If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace."

Rick Dellaratta: "When we fill our souls up with creativity, artistry and intelligence ...we have a better chance at avoiding the behavior that leads to destruction."

But who really cares what either of these wars have been costing us, are presently costing us and will be costing us in the future.

There ain't a damn thing that any of us reading this can do about it. Elect a Republicn to replace Obama in 2012. You must be joking. Do so if you wish, but it will not stop this country's constant war-mongering.

I love the part about a long-term partnership with Afghanistan even after the troops are withdrawn (as if that is ever really going to happen)

Let's see if I've got this right.....terrorist attacks on our soil on 9/11; attacks on Afghanistan because Osama bin Laden was there when he directed the attacks. Ignore it for a few years and go start an unjustified war in Iraq. Turn that whole country upside down. Then go back to prioritizing Afghanistan and get more Americans and NATO forces killed there. What a great ego trip.

We somewhere along the line became responsible for stabilizing the Afghan government, their miiitary and their police force and all this for a government that we consider to be corrupt.

Well, it's a good thing we've got these things to spend billions of our taxpayer dollars on....Otherwise, we'd be pissing away the money on some silly domestic problems of our own. How truly selfish that would be.

Lest we forget, we also have Iran "on the drawing board". We don't really have a problem with them, but we surely must eventually attack them to pacify Israeli President Netanyahu or he won't think that we're really his ally and then refuse to take billions of dollars in military aid from us each year.

Soldier on, Mr. Prez! You're going nowhere fast in Afghanistan (ditto Iraq and Pakistan). These wars and unemployment will suck the blood out of you. You coulda been a champ...

Reading today's CD David Korten article 'Debt vs. Localization' he cited 'Climate Rage' by Naomi Klein so I read it. In Naomi Klein's article she indicated 'costs of reparations to developing countries ... these costs are according to The World Bank ... reparations to developing countries as high as $100 billion/year for the next decade ... with shift to renewable energy the cost could be as much as $600 billion/year for the next decade'.

Then reading this article about the increasing costs of the Afghan war, with the cummulative costs of both, the Afghan war and the Iraq war at $1 Trillion so far and it's not reached 10 years yet ... for that we get, and inflict, death and destruction. The monetary costs will continue along with the death and destruction. The human costs, whether for the U.S. lives lost or the lives of Iraqi's or Afghani's, are undefinable and unimaginable.

But ... imagine ... just for a moment ... and only considering the monetary aspects of the wars ... all the money the U.S. has spent so far could have gone pretty far in paying for the costs of reparations and shifting those developing countries to renewable energies. We would have done something to heal the environmental wounds we've inflicted on innocent people and Mother Earth. Some good would have been achieved, whereas war never achieves anything.

The illegal Bush-Obama war on Afghanistan has lasted longer than both World Wars One and Two together, but then we got to be on the 'winning' side for those wars.

There is no gravy train in human history quite like the MIC. Think for a second - especially in these hard times - just how difficult it is for any company to make millions in profits. Businesses go under by the thousand each day and just as many struggle to keep afloat. Now imagine if you were part of a small group (twenty, fifty?) of firms with guaranteed, huge profits every single year with no competition and NAME YOUR COSTS. Then you can understand why the MIC will be the hardest of the corporate welfare queens to dismantle. And why our foreign policy won't be changing any time soon.

You have generals, congressmen, the big hitters in oil and anyone else benefiting from imperial resource theft in on the action. Since so many of the media giants have their dirty fingers in the pie, they play the role of cheerleader.The numbers in dollars are mind-blowing. It's like trying to conceptualize the dynamics behind a layer of Vishnu schist.

Afghan War Costs Now Outpace and Obliterate Social Security, Healthcare and Education. Our 'elected' officials do not care as their millions are safely tucked away. The next stap is to repudiate the National Debt or, more likely, to inflate their National Debt out of existance. All of our savings will be worthless again and the only thing of value in this country will be all those foreclosed houses that the Big Banks are amassing. I can scarcely wait for November. If at first we don't secede then...

Drat, if I had that kind of money I could buy an Island where I don't need the European's god of green paper to live my life. Just hunt, fish, gather & grow some food on the Island. Have other people of Native heritage who know how to live with Creator's earth wisely and properly living on the Island.

Then hope the Europeans or no one else now shows up or there goes Tahiti. Be as close to Heaven as you could get without actually dying.

But just another day closer to my journey being completed through this insane world.

Life is good. What an experience! It's always best to forgive.

"A long term partnership"

Obama is not only channeling John Wayne, he's now channeling Don Corleone.

" From this point of view, war can be called almost an upper-class sport. The novel interests and excitements it provides, the inflations of power, the satisfaction it gives to those very tenacious human impulses — gregariousness and parent-regression — endow it with all the qualities of a luxurious collective game which is felt intensely just in proportion to the sense of significant rule the person has in the class division of his society. A country at war — particularly our own country at war — does not act as a purely homogeneous herd. The significant classes have all the herd-feeling in all its primitive intensity, but there are barriers, or at least differentials of intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely without impediment throughout the entire nation. A modern country represents a long historical and social process of disaggregation of the herd. The nation at peace is not a group, it is a network of myriads of groups representing the cooperation and similar feeling of men on all sorts of planes and in all sorts of human interests and enterprises. In every modern industrial country, there are parallel planes of economic classes with divergent attitudes and institutions and interests — bourgeois and proletariat, with their many subdivisions according to power and function, and even their interweaving, such as those more highly skilled workers who habitually identify themselves with the owning and the significant classes and strive to raise themselves to the bourgeois level, imitating their cultural standards and manners. Then there are religious groups with a certain definite, though weakening sense of kinship, and there are the powerful ethnic groups which behave almost as cultural colonies in the New World, clinging tenaciously to language and historical tradition, though their herdishness is usually founded on cultural rather than State symbols. There are even certain vague sectional groupings. All these small sects, political parties, classes, levels, interests, may act as foci for herd-feelings. They intersect and interweave, and the same person may be a member of several different groups lying at different planes. Different occasions will set off his herd-feeling in one direction or another. In a religious crisis he will be intensely conscious of the necessity that his sect (or sub-herd) may prevail, in a political campaign, that his party shall "

- Randolph Bourne, "War is the Health of the State"

Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."

The list of quotes I came up with was long but someone needs to find or make some new quotes that apply directly to Obama's continuation of Bush II's crimes and nightmares. This historical situation (in what was a democratic republic) of a president from a nominal "opposition" party riding to power on a wave of revulsion towards the previous president and then promulgating virtually the entire anti-Constitutional, anti-Geneva Conventions, treaty-annihilating, anti-habeas corpus, anti-posse comitatus agenda of that previous president whose policies he pretended to run against is unprecedented to this degree in all of history to my knowledge. The sheer level of Obama's perfidy is jaw dropping. The smallness and scattered nature of protest against these criminals and criminal crony aids and abetters should make thinking people everywhere weep, then dry and wash their eyes until they see clearly again, and then we should all organize for our own common good.

I'll keep it brief. (I won't copy-and-paste long-winded sermons or boring poems).

From the article:

"WASHINGTON - The monthly cost of the war in Afghanistan, driven by troop increases and fighting on difficult terrain, has topped Iraq costs for the first time since 2003 and shows no sign of letting up."

Good. Let the Pentagram spend the USA into the ground. Let the dumb-asses park a king's fortune in military hardware on the other side of the planet and then fail.

The USA has only one plan for you: Birth, School, Work, Death. Nothing in between. No fun.

Stop thinking of America as YOUR country. It's not.

The water in Washington DC is heavily contaminated with lead.

The water in Rome during the years 100 BC thru 200 AD+ was heavily contamned with lead.

It took a long time for the Roman Empire to fall..., this is the jet age, events run much faster now. Do we have two more years of brain damaged leadership? ... Maybe only one.

As Donald Trump advised, "learn the Chinese language".