{"id":31326,"date":"2018-02-21T08:06:20","date_gmt":"2018-02-21T13:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31326"},"modified":"2018-02-21T08:06:20","modified_gmt":"2018-02-21T13:06:20","slug":"tomgram-danny-sjursen-buttering-up-the-pentagon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31326","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Buttering Up the Pentagon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Buttering Up the Pentagon<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Recently, the Pentagon\u2019s top Asia official, Randall Schriver, told senators that the Afghan war would cost this country\u2019s taxpayers $45 billion<\/a> in 2018, including $5 billion for the Afghan security forces, $13 billion for U.S. forces in that country, and $780 million in economic aid.\u00a0 How the other $26 billion would be spent is unclear and, given the Pentagon\u2019s record in these years, Schriver\u2019s estimate could prove a low-ball figure.\u00a0 All in all, it\u2019s just another year in this country\u2019s endless war there.\u00a0 Still, if Schriver is on the mark, in Afghanistan alone the American taxpayer will spend more than a fifth of the $200 billion the Trump administration is urging<\/a> Congress to put up for the rebuilding of America\u2019s crumbling<\/a>infrastructure. (The estimated cost of the full war on terror in President Trump\u2019s proposed 2018 budget, according to the Costs of War Project<\/a>, is approximately… yep, you guessed it: $200 billion.) And, of course, all of that is next to nothing when compared to the $5.6 trillion<\/a>the Costs of War Project estimates the war on terror has already cost us (with certain future expenses added in).<\/p>\n

Under the circumstances, isn\u2019t it remarkable that the government has sent so many taxpayer dollars tumbling down the rabbit hole of its failed wars and the \u201creconstruction\u201d scams<\/a> in Afghanistan and Iraq that once passed for \u201cnation-building\u201d? (By 2014, the U.S. had already sunk more money<\/a> into \u201creconstructing\u201d Afghanistan than it had once put into the Marshall Plan to rebuild all of Western Europe — and compare the results of each of those investments!)\u00a0 More remarkable still, for all the bitter political disputes in these years about how government money should be spent, there has never been real disagreement here, no less significant protest, over the decision to put such staggering sums into America\u2019s wars.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Buttering Up the Pentagon Recently, the Pentagon\u2019s top Asia official, Randall Schriver, told senators that the Afghan war would cost this country\u2019s taxpayers $45 billion in 2018, including $5 billion for the Afghan security forces, $13 billion for U.S. forces in that country, and $780 million in economic aid.\u00a0 How the other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[18770,15620,1063,528,620,7413,1796,862],"class_list":["post-31326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-danny-sjursen","tag-mic","tag-military-expenditures","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-pentagon","tag-tomdispatch","tag-us-congress","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31327,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31326\/revisions\/31327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}