The costs of war - when is enough enough?

[Jemmons]

First take a look at the ticker:

http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

In the years since Baghdad fell, several analysts have sought better estimates for the war's true cost. Last August, Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver at the Institute for Policy Studies issued a paper predicting that the total cost could reach $700 billion at the then-current spending level of $5.6 billion per month. Like the CostOfWar.com tally, this figure included only direct expenditures. ...


Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Linda Bilmes... put the cost to the US at between $1 trillion (their most "conservative" estimate) and $2.2 trillion (their "moderate" one).
Sixty billion, 239 billion, 2.2 trillion dollars. The more such figures swirl, the more necessary it is to change the question. The real matter at hand is not "How much will it cost?" but "When does it start to matter?" ...


One Vietnam tipping point came in late 1967 when, for the first time, opinion polls showed that a bare majority of Americans considered the conflict a "mistake". The size of this majority surged after the start of the Tet Offensive in January 1968. In a watershed moment in the wake of that onslaught, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite both echoed and solidified public sentiment by famously indicating that the US could not win the war. "To say we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past," he told his television audience. "To say that we are mired in a stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion."

Source and more:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page.html

[katmondoo]

1. Heard on C-Span last night from a senator

The Pentagon,in their report for funding is saying we will be at war for another 20 years. They want to develop robot planes that will zero in on a target anywhere in the world controlled from here in the US. All countries will be under our rule. Whomever disobeys us will be bombed. Scary but I do not believe this will happen, too many people are going against Bush's cabal.