War

Car bomb targets Hezbollah in Lebanon.

"It was the second bombing in the neighborhood of Haret Hreik this month amid a series of attacks that have shaken Lebanon in a spillover of Syria's civil war into its smaller neighbor. The violence has targeted both Sunnis and Shiites, and further stoked sectarian tensions that are already running high as each Lebanese community lines up with its brethren on opposing sides of the Syrian conflict."

The US doesn't care who its wars kill.

Pat Buchanan recognizes US wars reap no benefits.

"The neoconservatives say much of this might have been averted, had we left a stronger contingent of U.S. troops in Iraq and supported the Syrian uprising before the jihadists took control.
They were for attacking Assad last summer, are for more severe sanctions on Iran now, and are for war if Iran does not give up all enrichment of uranium.
But the neocons have broken their pick with the people. For they have been wrong about just about everything.
They were wrong about Saddam’s WMD and a “cakewalk” war.
They were wrong about how welcome we would be in Iraq and how Baghdad would become a flourishing democracy and model for the Mideast.
They did not see the Sunni-Shia war our intervention would ignite.
They were wrong about how our interests would be served in attacking Libya.
They did not see the disaster that would unfold in Pakistan."

Some record.

Trying to tally the real costs of war.

"The most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler once wrote that "War is a racket." That was in 1935. If only he could see it now. The cash flow enabling the global war on terror which was launched in 2001 is astonishing, numbers that are too large to even imagine. Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the total cost of Iraq alone will exceed $5 trillion when all the borrowed money and legacy expenses for 30,000 wounded soldiers are finally paid off. And Iraq is only one part of the enormous shift in national resources that has taken place over the past twelve years.
The direct costs of the Bush-Obama war are reflected in the Defense and intelligence budgets, both of which are more than twice as big as they were pre-9/11, but factor in the additional domestic costs for the Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and growth of the federal bureaucracy in general and the numbers become mind boggling. And then there is the replication of the federal spending at the state and local levels reflected in the increases in numbers of police and the establishment of homeland security offices in nearly every state as well as in some counties and cities. New York City alone has more than 34,000 policemen, to include a large intelligence division and counter-terrorism group that has been accused of spying on local Muslims all along the East Coast. It was trained by the CIA and is headed by a former CIA analyst. Many large companies have also either been either compelled or convinced to spend increasing sums on security, nearly all of which is unnecessary.
So if war on terror is a racket, the question becomes how long will it take before the productive part of the economy collapses under the strain of paying for a huge package of goods and services that do not actually produce anything."

I don't think it will be long now.

"It may be happening already as the US economy continues to struggle after its reversals five years ago, but the media and public figures can only rarely be seen calling for some retrenchment because they themselves benefit greatly from the status quo and have been largely immune to the consequences of their bad decision-making. This lack of any sustained public outcry over the expensive new national security state just might be because many people are in fact making quite a lot of money out of it. "

May? Politicians, bureaucrats, plutocrats, the media and everybody else are guided by self-interest.

"When all the increases are added up and compared to the baseline of 2001, the war on terror currently costs the American taxpayer more than $500 billion per year. As there may be only 100 or so terrorists seriously interested in attacking the United States directly, that works out to something like $5 billion per year per terrorist."

Great analysis.

"It all adds up to a huge pile of money and a lot of interested parties who want to keep the gravy train going. If you add up the soldiers, bureaucrats, policemen, and private contractors you come up with 8,900,000 Americans who are directly dependent on the spending on the government’s war on terror for their livelihood. They are present in every county and town in the United States. They all have a powerful incentive to promote the national security state and government officials, who also benefit from the largesse, listen to them in ways that they do not listen to the rest of us.
The current total federal budget is $3.77 trillion, much of which is dedicated to "keeping us safe." It is just under 25% of the national GNP and growing, but it is only part of the story as it does not include state and local expenditures for police and homeland security."

It's all about the money.

"And it is all done to fight a few hundred terrorists, mostly being pursued by the authorities in their home countries, moving every night to avoid surveillance and hiding in caves. Economic collapse due to military overextension is not unthinkable, witness the fall of the Soviet Union twenty years ago."

Not unthinkable?