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What Did Our Trillion Dollars Buy?
Three Wars Uncompleted, the Price Unpaid
By VIJAY PRASHAD
“Let contradictions prevail! Let one thing contradict another! And
let one line of my poems contradict another!”
-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
On May 30, at 10:06am, the United States exchequer turned over its
trillionth dollar to the U. S. armed forces for the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. A trillion dollars is a lot of money. As my friends at the
National Priorities Project put it, if I made a $1 million a year, it
would take me a million years to earn a trillion dollars. The U. S.
government expended the same amount in nine years, fighting two wars. So
what did our trillion tax dollars buy?
The best way to answer this question is to see if the U. S. government
was able to attain its war aims in each theatre. But what are the war
aims? These are unclear. Albeit a democracy, the United States
government has been chary with its intentions. Of such silences are
conspiracies made. The bilious Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote that
most of what is classified by the government is meaningless (Secrecy,
1999). Much of it is already in the public domain. War aims are not
hidden because they are secret. Most of the time they are unarticulated
because the wars themselves are embarrassingly tied to certain limited
class needs: power and resources lead the pack. Patriotism is much
easier as social glue than patrimonial entitlement.
For more, see http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad06112010.html
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