Lingering Wars

We are now in the ninth year of the war in Afghanistan; the sixth year in Iraq. The United States of America has a basic defense budget of $533.7 billion. As of today, we have spent a combined total of $917,193,132,514 for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is Congress daft or something?

Apparently they do not see the economic problems as we see them (from eye-level). Instead of ending the wars which should have ended a long time ago - the Obama administration has announced today that they will not be setting a date for the Afghanistan withdrawal of troops. Along with that prettily packaged announcement, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has also announced that Obama will need to decide on whether he wants to send another 40,000 troops into Afghanistan.

This is just ridiculous. Who made these people in charge? In case they haven't checked recently, the national debt today is $11,821,323,707,051. With the public option for health care gone to the dogs, I'm surprised that they even had the audacity to make such an announcement as they did today.

It is predicted that by 2010, the cost of the Afghanistan war will surpass that of the Iraq war. I wish they would start making predictions about how many people will be homeless here in the United States in the next year - that's American citizens we're talking about.

As I read the MSNBC article regarding Obama's wishy washy decision-making habits that are beginning to look a lot like ex-Bush's, the slide shows on the side of the page were reminding me to support our troops. I do support our troops. I do not support the privatization of a military that is in countries that we no longer need to be and is draining financial resources that we can use here at home.

During Obama's presidential campaigning, I distinctly remember him stating that we should be withdrawing from Iraq as soon as possible. Once he took office however it, the date changed from 2010 to 2011, now it sits 2012 - still not sure about that one.

There is no end in sight for the war in Afghanistan. The case that is being made to remain there is the fear that Taliban still has a stronghold in parts of the country. However, there are still similar problems happening in Iraq. The strategy that the military needs to start focusing on is to train the Iraqi and Afghani military to handle domestic issues themselves.

Obama doesn't want the military to leave the countries and a civil war to break out amongst the local groups. Who's to say that there isn't civil war among the groups going on right now? The Shiite and Sunni groups target each other constantly in Iraq.

It seems that every time the President talks about the wars, a new deadline is set and more money is allocated towards keeping the wars going. It baffles me that a war was started that many Americans were against right from the beginning - and still with the new administration cannot seem to end.

Congress and President Obama need to focus more on our own economy before they go and fix other country's problems. Those countries at least have some hope that their own governments will step in and protect them. We don’t have any other resource except our own government to help us through hard economic times where health care is the issue at hand – not a war.