Jim says:

I guess we are lucky that the fiscal conservatives are running things in Washington. This is going to get far more expensive. If things settle down in Iraq, the reconstruction costs will be even greater. In our area, we have old industrial towns that need reconstructed. The steel industry left town. There just isn’t the money to do logical development. We got public housing and that fell apart over 20 years. We had some local flooding and now we have more little towns with more empty commercial buildings and devastated communities. Again there isn’t capital for rebuilding. I’m sure the federal government will find hundreds of billions more dollars for rebuilding Iraq. Here we are in the Rust Belt of the USA and we can’t rebuild four or five city blocks and the city is on the brink of financial ruin. Send another $100 billion to Iraq for the war and everything will be better. Yea right.

T.C. Moore says:

The first thought that popped into my head was “How much is freedom worth?”. But of course the tragedy is that most people, free or not, don’t know what freedom means. How does someone without it know what they are missing, and how does someone who has it know what it would be like to lose it?

BTW, there is an objective measure of the freeness of various states:
http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/survey2005.htm
Also, I’m reminded of a quote from Bob Simon, who was in Moscow in the 80’s doing a report. He asked his Soviet friend “Why does everyone look at me, why do I stand out? Is it because I’m smiling?”. His host replied, “No, it’s because you do not look afraid.”

I imagine the realization of freedom’s value comes during the transition from one to the other. Imagine those Japanese that were kidnapped by North Korea and kept there for decades. How it slowly dawned on them that they would be prisoners indefinitely, even though they had food, shelter, and “reasonable lives”. The only parallel for the other direction I can think of, where freedom comes on suddenly, would be the multitude of activists and newspaper editors and reporters that can mostly do their job now without worrying about being killed (by the government), if not, unfortunately, being temporarily closed down.

Anyway, one could argue that the $600 billion we spent on WWI and Vietnam went to waste. The jury is still out on Iraq. I admire the people who are fighting to make the sacrifices of our soldiers and money worthwhile, instead of screaming to cut our losses. What’s done is done, and whether is was prompted by lies and deception or not, we have a chance to bring true freedom _and_ security to Iraqis.

Meanwhile, what’s the point of rebuilding the Rust Belt? Who would use those new buildings? People don’t want to live there anymore, and have voted with their feet to find opportunity and happiness elsewhere. Government can’t create jobs and prosperity out of thin air, and any money spent their would be like throwing it into the wind. Since it’s all off budget anyway, money not spent on Iraq would just go towards reducing the deficit. It would not be spent at home, mainly because Democrats and Republicans alike would want to spend it on stupid shit like rebuilding abandoned areas.

Jim says:

Would Iraq would be reduced to chaos if the U.S. pulled out? If the upcoming elections establish stability, good for Iraq. I doubt that election day in Iraq will be anything more than more chaos. Most people want Iraq to start pumping out oil, doing deals and living like a civilized place does. The current occupation of Iraq is expensive for the U.S. and deadly for Iraq. The U.S. could start up the bombing again, kill another 50,000 people or whatever. There is and always will be a core group opposed to our occupation that keeps fighting. This will not stop and we could be there for a decade and spend hundreds of billions more dollars. These people are just nasty and anti-American. The Bush administration believes that they are spreading democracy and promoting freedom. Great! We had a civil war here and those old issues of liberty got worked out, so maybe freedom in Iraq means that Iraq should be free to have a civil war if that’s what the people want. What we are saying by our actions is that war and military action is a good thing. They could have a hell of a war without our help, so who are we helping? We are saying we want you to be free, but we don’t want you to have a civil war. We want a piece of the action, so we have our own war going on. We have the best war money can buy. You can’t sell freedom in Iraq though.