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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (217038)	2/8/2007 10:13:55 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

That means the Pentagon expects to spend nearly $12 billion a month on the two wars next year - or about $1 billion every two-and-a-half days. By comparison, the State Department has budgeted about $1 billion for migration, refugee, and international disaster and famine assistance for all of 2008. I wonder what would happen if we got the military totally out of Iraq, replaced them with a few hundred news reporters with no leashes, taxed with the job of uncovering any and all dirt, then told the Iraqis we will send them $12B/month if they deport themselves with model good behavior, otherwise, if the reporters uncover any naughtiness, off goes the spigot? Seems like a better plan than the current surge to me.

To: jttmab who wrote (217038)	2/8/2007 11:00:44 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

It is remarkable. Simply breathtaking. "What's remarkable about this year's military budget is that it's the largest budget since World War II, but, of course, we're not fighting World War II," noted William Hartung, a defense expert at the World Policy Institute in New York. "We're fighting terrorist networks armed with explosives and AK-47s. This has to be considered a triumph of an arms lobby that can obviously sell us things we don't need at a time that the president claims we're in mortal danger." To put a different perspective on the figure, $623 billion is about $10 billion more than the total gross domestic product (GDP) of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa and oil giants Nigeria and Angola, in 2005, according to the World Bank.