War, Waste, or Worlds Apart?

[Eclogite]

The total amount spent by the US on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 is in excess of one trillion dollars. (Source: COSTOFWAR.COM - The Cost of War )

 

If this money had been spent on the exploration of Mars we could now have a small colony on the planet and be well advanced with initial exploration and exploitation.

 

Would this have been a better use of the funds?

[Boerseun]

Just goes to show. Human exploration of Mars is definitely not a matter of there not being any money available - it's purely a lack of political will.

 

The biggest beneficiaries of the Iraqi war is the arms manufacturers. There's no reason why they can't retool their factories to become more involved in space exploration. Most of them are involved in the Space Program in some way or another already, guys like Douglas, etc, (Pyro would know better then me) - so it would simply be a matter of reducing the side of the factory that make things that go boom and expanding the side making things that go whoosh. But their bottom lines could stay intact, or even expand.

 

Let's say the US goes it alone (to equal the money they spent on Iraq) and explore and colonize Mars. The end effect might even be better than these "pre-emptive" wars in the Third World in that they will regain the international prestige they wasted by their unilateral military adventures. Third World countries would want to align themselves with the US, because there will be lots and lots of contracts for delivery of several basic natural resources that can be sourced from the Third World to fuel the US's vastly expanded space program.

 

It will be brilliant for the US, in that loads of domestic jobs will be created, scientists will stay put rather than massively migrating to Europe where the centre of research gravity have shifted to over the last decade or so, it will attract tons of scientists from abroad (like the massive 1930's migration of European scientists to the US - see what that did for the US for the following 50 years!), and so on. The money spent by the government on such a massive project will be paid back (or a considerable amount of it, at least) by increased tax income from lowered unemployment in the States as the requirements for this project spreads through the entire US economy. The pizza shops close to Space Research centers will have increased sales, for instance, and will have to expand, and employ more people to cook and deliver pizzas, as an example.

 

All in all, from a trillion spent on exploring Mars, some money at least will be recouped directly and in a very short time through the money filtering through the entire economy, thereby raising tax income. By blowing up Iraq and then merely policing it, all the money goes up in smoke, and what is spent by the soldiers on simple consumer goods only serve to stimulate the broken Iraqi economy. The rest of it goes up in smoke and does nothing to attract high-caliber individuals to the States nor to buy the US any goodwill.

 

I say it could have been brilliant and so much better. But unfortunately it's only hindsight that's 20/20 - and the people in the military industrial complex worldwide are so narrow-minded and they own so many politicians that to ever expect any country (not just the US) to ever haul their heads out of their asses and think of such a scheme might be a bit too much to hope for.

 

It's a sad world, indeed.

[Qfwfq]

Would this have been a better use of the funds?

Loads of things could have been done with the resources that were spent (and that total doesn't include what was spent by a few other countries). Good strategy could have helped the people against those oppressive governments and aided them in economic reconstruction, putting them in much better disposition toward Euoropean and American nations. Instead, I've heard that the Taliban can persuade guys to be a kamikaze by promissing the equivalent of a mere US$50 to their family. Go figure.

 

Like the money spent on many a war, that trillion is pretty much borrowed money, already spent and yet to be repaid.

[Michaelangelica]

Yes, burning the money to keep the homeless warm would have been abetter use.

 

Slowly the lies are stripped away. A full-dress British inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war is revealing what some of us suspected pretty much from the beginning: that attacking Saddam Hussein was an act of bottomless folly, driven by the hubris of George W. Bush and the American neo-cons, and supported unquestioningly by that self-righteous prig Tony Blair. To which list of shame we can add the name John Howard. The inquiry has had little coverage here, crowded out by the election campaign. More's the pity. A killer blow was delivered last week by the Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, who sounds like a character from an Agatha Christie whodunit but who was, in fact, the head of the British counter-intelligence service MI5 from 2002 to 2007.

 

She demolished the neo-con lie at the heart of the war, that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda had conspired in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

 

''To my mind, Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind,'' she said. ''There is no credible intelligence that demonstrates that Iraq was implicated in planning the 11 September attacks.''

 

Manningham-Buller maintained the war had actually made Britain less safe, not more, by radicalising young British Muslims. ''The Iraq war heightened the extremist view that the West was trying to bring down Islam. We gave bin Laden his jihad,'' she said. What she did not explain was why Blair had not accepted this advice at the time.

 

This week the inquiry heard from the former chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix, a man comprehensively blackguarded by Bush and his cronies as a fool and dupe. He hammered a few more nails into the coffin of neo-con credibility.

 

It was his ''firm view'' that the Iraq war was illegal. But the Bush administration had been ''high'' on the idea of military action to deal with international crises. ''They thought they could get away with it and therefore it was desirable to do so.''

 

As for those infamous weapons of mass destruction touted as an excuse for war by Bush, Blair and Howard, Blix said he and his experts had made 700 inspections at 500 sites but had found no evidence of them at all.

 

The infuriating thing is that we get no confession or apology from the neo-cons. Nothing, either, from the legions of conservative commentators who so slavishly spread their lies. There is, though, some satisfaction in seeing them consigned to the garbage bin of history.

Government that won't offend, don't you worry about that

[Moontanman]

One of the things that occurs to me every time I read about the amount of money spent on war fare and arms and munitions is how much we could have accomplished in space with just a small percentage of the money we spend on killing people. If we had spent 5% of the money we spent on warfare since WW2 on space travel the US would probably own most of the inner solar system and be working on a large part of the outer solar system. Colonies, resource exploitation, we have no idea where we would be because we have spent only a pittance on space travel while politicians sit around and debate how much of the tiny allowance NASA is getting will be cut so their constituents will think they are saving money.

[Knothead]

The total amount spent by the US on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 is in excess of one trillion dollars. (Source: COSTOFWAR.COM - The Cost of War )

 

If this money had been spent on the exploration of Mars we could now have a small colony on the planet and be well advanced with initial exploration and exploitation.

 

Would this have been a better use of the funds?

 

 

I am not one to say that there war is never justified. However, I also don't believe that because it's justified necessarily means that it's necessary or unavoidable.

 

I have recently become so jaded about government and those that make it up that for the first time in my life, I will not vote in the coming elections. I don't see that it makes a difference. Even good people with pure hearts and noble dreams become somehow neutered and powerless when they become part of the machine.

 

If we are to hope for colonies on the moon or mars, (sign me up) our hopes would be better placed in private enterprise.

 

It's a sad world indeed.

[maikeru]

The total amount spent by the US on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 is in excess of one trillion dollars. (Source: COSTOFWAR.COM - The Cost of War )

 

If this money had been spent on the exploration of Mars we could now have a small colony on the planet and be well advanced with initial exploration and exploitation.

 

Would this have been a better use of the funds?

 

There are a million things better that could've been done with the money.

 

A few hundred thousand to a few million dollars could be used to replant forests and reverse desertification while also providing jobs and income, and we have a difficult time finding funding for that. Even on a massive scale may require a hundred million or so dollars. But we don't have money for that. Note that these amounts fall far short of what was used to bail out failed car companies, failed banks, and failed nations.

 

SavingGhana: The Great Green Wall of Africa - african unity in a plant.

 

The Great Green Wall of Africa was first suggested by the ex-Nigerian Prez Olusegun Obasanjo, in 2005, and put before the AU, but could not be developed due to lack of funds (surprise, surprise!)

 

How the hell are we going to get off this planet?

 

When I was younger and reading Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and other SF authors, I thought we'd be mining asteroids, flying through the rings of Saturn and dancing with Big Mama Jupiter, and hurtling toward a bright, space-age future where the stars were ripe and ready for conquest. Now I realize we cannot even take care of our basic needs or our home, our planet, and if we cannot learn to care for what feeds us, clothes us, shelters us, and sustains us, I really do not know how we're going to get off this little rock. We do not know how to use or not use what's available to us. We don't even know what's available to us or what we options we have or had before we destroy them. In the end, we are left with the worst options and sometimes no options at all.

[Tormod]

When I was younger and reading Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and other SF authors, I thought we'd be mining asteroids, flying through the rings of Saturn and dancing with Big Mama Jupiter, and hurtling toward a bright, space-age future where the stars were ripe and ready for conquest. Now I realize we cannot even take care of our basic needs or our home, our planet, and if we cannot learn to care for what feeds us, clothes us, shelters us, and sustains us, I really do not know how we're going to get off this little rock. We do not know how to use or not use what's available to us. We don't even know what's available to us or what we options we have or had before we destroy them. In the end, we are left with the worst options and sometimes no options at all.

 

I just thought that this was a very inspired piece of text! :artgallery: