Joanna wrote:
>
> CGE writes
>
> "And it is a war in which one-half of one percent of the American people
> bear the burden. And the other 99.5 percent basically go on about their
> daily life, as if the war did not exist."
>
> No. We all bear the burden. The money that could go into rebuilding
> infrastructure, health care, education....etc. is going into this war.
> The first step forward for a peace movement is to talk about the costs
> of this war to everyone.
No. This assumes that if the money is not spent on war it will be spend on something that 'we' think useful. It wouldn't be. It won't be.
A working premise should be that those guiding U.S. policy believe that austerity is an economic and political need. We need to understand why that is the case, but whatever the actual reason, it is not the costs of war. If anything the costs of war are just an excuse for the austerity. If peace proke out, they would have to find some other excuse.
It is true, probably, as that weirdo Boot argued in the WSJ a couple weeks ago that the u.s. can't afford both being a world power AND providing medical car for its citizens. But that still doesn't mean that 'we' are bearing the "burden" of the Afghan War; it means we are bearing the burden of living in a cvapitalist society.
Carrol