The terrible cost of US wars

This is the latest in a series of studies done by Harvard’s senior lecturer on public policy, Linda Bilmes, together with economist Joseph Stiglitz. Each successive study has raised the estimate of the wars’ long-term costs, due in large measure to the rising and sustained costs of caring for and compensating hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have returned home suffering grievous physical and psychological trauma.

Concealed behind the raw numbers are lives forever altered, not only for the 50 000 American troops “wounded in action,” but also for hundreds of thousands more suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health problems — fully one third of those deployed — and traumatic brain injuries (inflicted on over a quarter of a million troops).

The Pentagon has attributed the unprecedented number of soldiers and Marines diagnosed with PTSD, depression, anxiety and other mental health issues to a changed culture within the armed forces dispelling some of the stigma associated with reporting such problems in previous wars.

While no doubt this is a factor, the nature of the wars themselves plays a decisive role. Launched on the basis of lies about terrorism and “weapons of mass destruction,” the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq initiated protracted dirty colonial-style occupations aimed at subjugating whole peoples and laying hold of strategic resources, most critically oil.

Soldiers told they were being sent to avenge 9/11 and fight Al Qaeda found themselves engaged in an entirely different enterprise, which involved terrible crimes against civilians and the turning of entire populations into the “enemy.” Of course, the US$6 trillion figure included in the Harvard report does not begin to make a full accounting for these wars.

It assesses only the impact on the US economy. What of the cost of rebuilding countries shattered by wars in which more than 1 million Iraqis and Afghans lost their lives? What about the cost of helping millions more who have been maimed or turned into refugees in their own countries?

As for the measurable costs of the wholesale destruction of social infrastructure — water, electricity, education, health care, employment — the study only includes the amount spent by the US government in reconstruction schemes riddled with corruption and incompetence, in which tens of billions of dollars were wasted or disappeared into the pockets of shady contractors and crooked politicians.

Then there was the financing of the wars. Bush administration officials such as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed at the outset that the cost of the Iraq war would be “something under US$50 billion” — less than one one-hundredth of the current estimate.

Paid for “off the books” of the normal budgetary process, the true costs to the American people —  now estimated at US$75 000 per household — were kept hidden. Instead of raising revenues to pay for military operations, the government cut taxes for the rich and borrowed some US$2 trillion, largely from abroad.

Bilmes, who correctly dismisses any prospect of the ending of full-scale wars in Iraq and Afghanistan producing a “peace dividend,” predicts that another long-term impact of war costs will be “a much smaller amount of an already-shrinking defence budget available for core military functions.”

The Obama administration has dramatically expanded drone warfare, conducting murderous remote-controlled bombing campaigns against defenceless populations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere and proclaiming the presidential right to order drone assassinations of American citizens.

Indeed, the impunity enjoyed by those who launched the wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, the failure to hold anyone accountable for patent war crimes — in the first instance George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet — makes more such wars all the more likely. The Obama administration has already carried out war for regime change in Libya and is backing a similar war in Syria, while threatening Iran with military aggression, deploying troops to Africa and carrying out a “pivot” toward Asia accompanied by continuous ratcheting up of military tensions with China.

While the working class had no say in the decision to launch wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and will be offered none in the new wars already being prepared, it will bear their full cost in the form of redoubled attacks on jobs, wages and essential social services, as well as in the killing and maiming of young workers sent to fight them.

The vast resources wasted and the incalculable human suffering inflicted by the bloated US military and intelligence apparatus pose the urgency of building a genuine mass movement against militarism and war. This can develop only as an independent social and political movement of the working class directed against the capitalist system. — wsws.