Posted on 05/07/2011 7:04:18 PM PDT by Bokababe
The most expensive public enemy in American history died Sunday from two bullets.
As we mark Osama bin Laden's death, what's striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we've gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.
What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden's terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
About 5 years ago, I worried aloud about what we were spending on all of this and what it would do to the US economy, but apparently it seemed "unpatriotic" to ask those questions back then.
In that same time frame how much money did we give the the jerry springer watching baby making do nothings of this country
Interesting assessment.
What can’t be counted is the cost of inaction? What would be the cost if we capitulated and were held hostage by Islamists around the world?
Its not just bin Laden. It is radical Islam as a whole. You can include Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Taliban and a whole host of terrorists.
Big deal. Obama surpassed that in one year.
All that money to Pakistan, and Osama is living there like the Sultan of Brunei.
Just think what liberals and their socialist programs cost. $3 trillion seems free by comparison AND it actually accomplished something!
Unfortunately nothing has changed.
Bin Laden’s plan was two fold. To kill as many Americans as possible and to undermine our capitalist system --- to cripple our economy, if possible.
Osama may be dead, but the American taxpayer will be paying for his terrorism against the USA for a very long time to come.
The big problem isn’t the years spent, it’s how much of the problem that we truly solved from the money spent. If $3 trillion put the vast majority of the radicals into hiding, I would be fine. But then, take a look at London or Islamabad, and you see there are loads of angry crowds for the guy you just put down. We didn’t bother addressing the problem where it counts, rather, we’ve figured that killing bin Laden, a decrepit vegetable sitting inside a trash heap of a house, makes anyone care, when he was pretty much left for dead. IMO, dear president put the spin on the story to entertain us, but it’s all idiotic: just tell us you killed a guy on life support who was pretty much left for dead by his comrades. It seems like the truth to me, and that’s probably why Bush gave up the official search anyways: bin Laden was just not that significant to us or al qaeda anymore.
Well, I think that it's just silly to think that we really had the option of doing nothing. We had to do something. We couldn't just get steamrolled by a handful of 7th century barbarians.
On the other hand, getting ourselves in debt with so much nation building might not have been in our best interests, either.
The author makes an interesting point of all of the innovations & benefits that seemed to come out of our previous wars, when not much innovation or new capabilities came out of this one.
Gotta love those government overruns of 6000%, eh, Donald?
If George W. Bush had said, "If we don't respond to the attacks, Al-Q's next plans are to target our military facilities. It will cost us only 5,000 military lives and $3 trillion over the next 10 years, but we could contain them that way," FReepers would have screamed at how irresponsible it was, and would have demanded the opposite course of action.
For World War II, we had a force of 12+ million and fought three major first-world enemies simultaneously. We've already spent more than 85% as much as we did for WWII and we're not nearly at victory. In fact, we seem to be doing exactly has UBL had hoped...spending far more to fight them.
We're there and we have to win, but we don't have to keep dumping money into them, especially when lots of that money ends up in the pockets of our enemies.
$3 trillion seems free by comparison AND it actually accomplished something!
I question how much it truly accomplished. Can the heightened security measures have an expiration date? Are we going to do anything about the angry mobs in Europe, notably in Britain? Is border security going to get tightened and we get to have military “peacekeepers” patrolling our borders? What will change now that Osama is dead? Until proven otherwise, the whole killing is little more than a publicity stunt to distract from our economic issues at hand, much less how much of a plan for helping business rise up a little more.
It would be a lot cheaper to just nuke these Islamobomo nations and “tribal areas” one at a time until all those still standing came rushing to Jesus. And if they didn’t ever come to Jesus well ....
The WOT is not over. We will be spending on the WOT until we win or we are defeated...
The Muslim Brotherhood, especially the European leadership actually despises Bin Laden for bringing the burgeoning Islamist movement to the attention of the West. Things were going allong just fine; mosques and study centers were being built everywhere. The Scandanavian invasion was well underway. The number of Brotherhood operations in Britain was numbered in the hundreds. Tens of thousands of Moroccans had swarmed into Spain and the Netherlands. There were more than a million Turks working in Germany. And then that fool Bin Laden had to go and spoil everything. Bin Laden may have cost us, but he cost Islam as well.
Bill Clinton’s legacy.
“For World War II, we had a force of 12+ million and fought three major first-world enemies simultaneously. We’ve already spent more than 85% as much as we did for WWII and we’re not nearly at victory. In fact, we seem to be doing exactly has UBL had hoped...spending far more to fight them.”
The worst thing is really how committed are the D.C. politicians to fighting this war. To me, they have appeared to be anything but “All in” or “Two Feet Forward”. In fact, what irks me something awful is everytime our president plays “holier than thou” and argues as if he knows what will offend Muslims and encourage more terrorism. I personally feel unconvinced by this “moral high ground”. President should just let us have the historical documentation that bin Laden died. If he was anything as despicable as some terminally ill man on life support, just let us know the truth, personally, I wouldn’t be so shocked to hear that as being the story of bin Laden’s demise.
As far as I am concerned, the WoT ended up being a cheap PR campaign when the rest of the world is going down the drain.
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