Bush commutes Libby sentence

[Thecla]

Estimates from the controller of NYC.

Well, then, How did he/she come up with the estimate? Is that the financial appropriation from the City of New York in response to 9/11? I only ask that you compare apples with apples. Who knows what the estimated of cost of the Iraq war is if you add in long term heath costs for veterans, the cost of restoring the military to it's former state, and so on and so on. Two trillion dollars is surely a gross underestimate of that amount. Never mind the cost to Iraq itself of the war, or the irreplaclable loss of lives (and, as a matter that's so sadly minor in the big scheme of this disaster, but which may still be significant hundreds of years from now, the destruction and looting of the remains of one of the cradles of human civilisation---the Venetian bombardment that ignited the Turkish gunpowder store in the Parthenon has nothing on what has happened in Iraq).

The libertarian in me wants the 2 trillion back, however we must ask what we bought for that 2 trillion. Was it merely 4 years of keeping the war over there?

The 2 trillion dollars has bought the US a greatly increased threat of long-term terrorism (I don't suggest that this threat was created by the Iraq war, but the policy of the Bush administration has been as if an arsonist set fire to your house and the fire department sent fire trucks filled with gasoline to control the blaze), 3,600 dead US soldiers (leaving aside the deaths in the shadow force of war contractors), 30,000 wounded (many seriously or crippled), and the loss of any US standing in the world,

The truth is that the US would be infinitely better off today had all the money for the Iraq war simply been burned.