Primary and tail costs added up:

$270 million per day
$1.9 billion per week
$7.6 billion per month
total so far: $311 billion
estimates say that this war will cost us over $1 trillion dollars total before it's over.

Question: Is the Iraq War a waste of money?

I described the Olympic National Park’s Draft General Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement (Draft GMP/EIS) in this post and my review of that plan in this post. Click "read more" below for the comments that I sent to the Park Service today. Comments are due by Sept. 30. See this post for information on commenting on the draft Plan.

Here's an article by Howard Zinn. In it, he discusses the futility of war in solving terrorism - the immorality and dysfunctionality, as well as the contradiction in terms of a "war on terror."

If America's war on terror is fueling anti-USA extremism, can American benevolence reverse the situation? Quite possibly, and I would like to add that it's worth a try.

Lastly, additional kudos to Ehren Watada for standing up, in the face of enormous pressure to conform to military service, and doing the right thing.

By Howard Zinn

There is something important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.

The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and- awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.

...

Here's a link: Alternet.