D.
————–
“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace”

–Imagine, nightmare scenario song, by John Lennon

DAR
It’s a law enforcement issue.

You don’t use a bulldozer to kill roaches.

You know who loved Bush’s overreach and disastrous invasion of a non-involved muslim country? Bin Laden. Great for recruitment. And a tremendous drain on American resources and lives. This is specifically what Bin Laden said he wanted to do in his letter (bankrupt America like he did the Soviets in Afghanistan), and it was amazing to watch Bush fall for it hook line and sinker. Time to change course and not follow the losing Bin Laden game plan anymore.

Note the cost:

****
Economist Stiglitz Says Iraq War Costs May Reach $5 Trillion

March 1 (Bloomberg) — Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz, author of a new book that claims the Iraq war will cost the U.S. more than $3 trillion, said the final tally is likely to climb much higher than that.

“It’s much more like five trillion,” Stiglitz said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. “We were trying to make Americans understand how expensive this war was…”…

“This war is the first war ever that’s been totally financed by borrowing, by deficits,” said Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York. “Because we haven’t raised taxes, because we’ve tried to pretend this war is for free, we’ve been skimping on our treatment of veterans.”

“Bills from the Iraq war will pile up for decades to come as the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars providing medical care and disability benefits to about 70,000 soldiers injured in the conflict, he said.

The government also will have to pay back with interest money it borrowed to finance the war, which will drive total costs higher,…”

Bloomberg

DAR
Most people have no concept of a “trillion.” Try this:

Three trillion American dollars, laid end to end, would stretch the 90+ million miles from the earth to the sun, and then back to the earth and then to the Sun once again and then there would still be several million miles of dollars left over.

Light travels approximately 187,000 miles per second (7.5 times around the earth). The sun is so far away it takes over eight minutes for light to travel to the earth.

Note also:

“it’s worth comparing… the cost estimates Bush officials bandied about before the war began. The authors present a damning “Nightline” transcript in which one official, Andrew Natsios, blandly told Ted Koppel that Iraq could be completely reconstructed for only $1.7 billion. (With the war now costing $12.5 billion a month, Natsios’ estimate would have been accurate if he had stipulated that it would pay for four days’ worth of reconstruction. Which, considering the delusional nature of most of the Bush administration’s pre-invasion estimates, may have been how long it thought it would take to rebuild the country.) Other officials settled on a figure of $50 billion to $60 billion. Larry Lindsey, Bush’s economic advisor, went way out on a limb, suggesting that the war might cost $200 billion — a figure derided by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as “baloney.” Rumsfeld refused even to offer a range of estimates, saying, “I’ve already decided that. It’s not useful.” He was right: It would not have been useful for those ginning up support for a war to predict that it might cost $3 trillion.”

“Iraq [will be] the second most expensive war in U.S. history, trailing only World War II, which cost an adjusted $5 trillion (and in which 16.3 million Americans served in the armed forces, with 400,000 dying).”

LINK

D.
———————
“If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. I’m going to prevent that.”
–Bush v Gore debate, October 3, 2000