We spent $3 trillion to get bin Laden.

Now that he's dead and now that we see how well our money is being spent in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, it's time to start shifting that money to the US again. We need jobs, we need teachers, we need roads and bridges and infrastructure. The only people who are against shifting money back to America are the ones who love the gravy train spending on war. It's in the financial best interest of the military industrial complex to keep us at constant war. It's in the financial best interest of many in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq as well to keep the war going. Once the hype of war dies down, so will the unquestioned budget money. It has to end but many are going to spend heavily to block change.

Is anyone in charge interested in building a better USA?

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.

All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America's costliest past enemies. Defeating the Confederate army brought the end of slavery and a wave of standardization—in railroad gauges and shoe sizes, for example—that paved the way for a truly national economy. Vanquishing Adolf Hitler ended the Great Depression and ushered in a period of booming prosperity and hegemony. Even the massive military escalation that marked the Cold War standoff against Joseph Stalin and his Russian successors produced landmark technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the economy.

http://www.americablog.com/2011/05/us-has-spent-3-trillion-in-fight.html

We did not go into Afghanistan purely to capture bin Laden but for a fair number of other important reasons. We also spent likely more than that on a war (Iraq) with absolutely no reasoning behind it.

I have approved of a single military adventure this country has embarked on in my life. I was born in 1948.

Shut 'em all down, everywhere, bring them home.

~ We now interrupt the previously scheduled hunt for Osama bin Laden, to bring you the highly nefarious and completely unjustified attack, invasion and occupation of Iraq. Please enjoy. ~

Name five.

reasons, all of them lies.

I have given a lot of thought to why we really went into Iraq and have settled on 2 possibilities:

1) A la Norman Mailer, we didn't really need Iraq's oil for ourselves, since we import most of our oil from South America, if memory serves. Mailer theorizes we went into Iraq to give us a strategic lever to hold over China and India, who do need oil from the Middle East.

or

2) (This I have not seen anywhere succinctly put, although it's so common sense that I'm sure more than one person thought of it): We went into Iraq so that we'd have bases for an eventual land-based invasion of Iran on two fronts: Afghanistan from the east and Iraq from the west.

Oh well. Support our Oops!

Something like that?

and then, instead of learning ONE DAMN THING from the collapse of the ussr, threw far more money than the soviets ever did making THE SAME EXACT MISTAKE when bin laden and some of the very people WE TRAINED AND ARMED turned their attention to us.

Maybe they didn't really forget. After all, they were personally benefiting from and enriching all their friends (and their companies) with big defense contracts. Financial treason.

they try to represent the interests of a narrow group of ultra-rich people, most of whom live opt to live in america, at least for as long as it's lucrative to do so.

Every time you surf, look something up, look at a pictures online, buy groceries, take your cellphone with you, that data gets recorded by major corporations, stored, analyzed and resold for commercial purposes. Total Information Analysis is now for-profit.

Most people don't seem to care that they've lost their privacy and been catalogued, so long as they can have their FaceBook experience.

In the long-run, that will result in a change in society as great as commercial jet travel or antibiotics.

Important distinction.

You see...the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions did nothing to help us in this mission.

one bit of information from this evil, unarmed terrorist? Some will say no amount of questioning would have resulted in any good information. Just kill him, don't bother with anything else...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts304.html?du
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House.

No explanation has been provided for why an unarmed bin Laden, in the absence of a firefight, was murdered by the SEALs with a shot to the head. For those who believe the government’s story that "we got bin Laden," the operation can only appear as the most botched operation in history. What kind of incompetence does it require to senselessly and needlessly kill the most valuable intelligence asset on the planet?

According to the US government, the terrorist movements of the world operated through bin Laden, "the mastermind." Thanks to a trigger-happy stupid SEAL, a bullet destroyed the most valuable terrorist information on the planet. Perhaps the SEAL was thinking that he could put a notch on his gun and brag for the rest of his life about being the macho tough guy who killed Osama bin Laden, the most dangerous man on the planet, who outwitted the US and its European and Israeli allies and inflicted humiliation on the "world’s only superpower" on 9/11.