by James Glaser
April 8, 2003

People will say that the eighty billion dollars the President and Congress want for the "start" of this war, is a cost of the War on Terrorism. The key word here is Start. Many in the Pentagon, White House, and Congress have been throwing around the number of twenty five billion dollars each year, for maybe as many as ten years, to get Iraq back on its feet. That's twenty five billion American tax dollars per year. Twenty Five billion is twenty five thousand million.

The reports are that over one hundred people are taken to a hospital every hour in Baghdad from wounds caused by our attack. Well as soon as we take over Baghdad those hospitals become American hospitals. As soon as this war is over America will have to rebuild all of those buildings we are blowing up now. America will pay for new schools, playgrounds, housing, gas stations, post offices, airports, electric companies, and anything else you can name, you and I will be paying for. Fighting terrorism is not cheap.

Yeah I know, the President forgot to even mention any of these costs, but heck he just assumed we knew all of this. You have to remember that all of this money is just extra money we have sitting around in Washington. You and I both know Americans have everything we need, so lets like spread the wealth.

Counting the cost of the September 11th terrorist attack and everything we have done since then, wars, troops sent all over the globe, the Office of Homeland Security, the loss of our economy, and all the bailouts for industries like the airlines have cost us, just guessing here, thousands of billions. To put it another way, millions of millions. Washington doesn't tell us because they don't know either.

You have to remember that is only money. There are other costs that are much higher.

There is the three thousand Americans that were killed in that first attack. There are also the three to five thousand innocent people we killed in our failed attempt to get Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. We don't count the civilians we kill. Now to this we have to add the over one thousand innocent people we have killed so far in Iraq. Lets just give it a round number and say twenty thousand innocent people wounded and maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Remember though the number of those killed and wounded in these two wars keep going up because both of them are on going.

We should never forget the cost of our own troops in these wars. Washington is never real clear on casualties on our side. Deaths yes, wounded no. I will have to guess here and my best guess is that we have lost one hundred and fifty killed and over five hundred wounded. Each of these are special, because these people were willing to give their life for our nation. Not everyone in America is willing to do that, in fact very few of those people that got us into all of this, were in the past or are now in the present, personally willing to defend America. These same people are more that willing to send young Americans though.

Still there are other costs to this War on Terrorism that President Bush never mentions and I doubt if he ever even thinks of them. America, you and I are losing our freedom and that is a price that will effect future generations and really if it keeps up at the rate we see today. It will destroy our Nation. America will no longer be the "Land of Free, Home of the Brave." Brave people do not allow their freedoms to be taken away for a promise of safety. Weak people do that.

Washington has made it so that their agents can come into our homes without our knowledge or permission, they no longer even need a search warrant. The President can now say that you are a danger to the State and he can have you put in prison forever. No lawyer, no charge, and no court date. Just forever in prison and he has done that to American Citizens already.

Today the government can read your mail. Medical records at one time were private, but no longer. Today even your library records are open to government inspection. America is farther in Debt than ever before and that takes away our freedom too. Today every child born in America has a portion of that debt as his or her birth right.

If this debt continues to rise we won't be able to fight any War on Terrorism. More and more of our tax money goes to just two areas of government. First we pay billions of dollars in interest on our debt and now about four hundred billion on "defense." These costs are stopping us from taking care of older Americans as well as the young.

America is the richest, most powerful nation on earth. America still has tens of thousands of citizens living under the stars on our streets. America has tens of millions of citizens without medical insurance, the only modern industrialized nation that has this problem. In many American cities less than half of students graduate from high school. America today is flooded with millions and millions of illegal aliens and we have no idea of who they are or where they live.

We do however still have thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons. Each and every year we develop better and better weapons that we can kill more people with. Each year we have more troops in more countries. To top every thing off we now have just about every country afraid of us.