Bygod we were right. We were right all those times we argued over at TOP against going into, staying, escalating, and continuing the war in Afghanistan. And now all the other "Credit Card Wars". Maybe a new one with Iran is being planned on the road ahead...

Trump says there ‘might be an escalation’ between US, Iran https://t.co/LR0O7IH7eu pic.twitter.com/puBZwWXALT

— Military Times (@MilitaryTimes) July 13, 2018

Iran says Trump has tried to meet with them. Gah, who knows why?

While President Trump has successfully engaged with North Korea, the opposite is true for Iran, which says it rejected his requests for a meeting with President Hassan Rouhani eight times at the last U.N. General Assembly https://t.co/pvVmM4l350

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) July 19, 2018

People in this country really need to know what these wars have cost them, are costing, will cost.... and not just in dollar terms. More might want to stop future wars if they new...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176449/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_maki...

The report was devastating -- or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it. "Between 2001 and 2017," it concluded, "U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed." I’m thinking of “Stabilization: Lessons From the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan” put out by the office of the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, or SIGAR. It focused on 15 years of U.S. efforts to defeat the Taliban and “reconstruct” that country. Issued in late May, it got a few cursory news reports before disappearing into the maw of Trump addiction. But don’t blame The Donald for that. When was the last time -- even before he entered the Oval Office -- that any serious attention was paid here to the longest war in American history, our forever war or “generational struggle” or “infinite war”? When was the last true policy debate on it?

What of it? Guess most people in the US can find no useful information for making decisions about the ongoing wars in the Middle East from the corporate media.

But though our suffering here pales in the face of the devastation and deaths of Afghanistan, as well as all the many other bombed to hell and back countries in the ME, through all this and the other wars in the Middle East our country has not escaped unscathed.

Credit-Card Wars: Today’s War-Financing Strategies Will Only Increase Inequality - https://t.co/MWlRPNKvs9 pic.twitter.com/ydhUnWnKSe

— Karl E (@therussophile) “credit-card wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Never before has this country relied so heavily on deficit spending to pay for its conflicts. The consequences are expected to be ruinous for the long-term fiscal health of the U.S., but they go far beyond the economic. Massive levels of war-related debt will have lasting repercussions of all sorts. One potentially devastating effect, a new study finds, will be more societal inequality.

In other words, the staggering costs of the longest war in American history -- almost 17 years running, since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 -- are being deferred to the future. In the process, the government is contributing to this country’s skyrocketing income inequality.

Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent $5.6 trillion on its war on terror, according to the Costs of War Project, which I co-direct, at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. This is a far higher number than the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion estimate, which only counts expenses for what are known as “overseas contingency operations,” or OCO -- that is, a pot of supplemental money, outside the regular annual budget, dedicated to funding wartime operations. The $5.6 trillion figure, on the other hand, includes not just what the U.S. has spent on overseas military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, but also portions of Homeland Security spending related to counterterrorism on American soil, and future obligations to care for wounded or traumatized post-9/11 military veterans. The financial burden of the post-9/11 wars across the Greater Middle East -- and still spreading, through Africa and other regions -- is far larger than most Americans recognize./therussophile/status/1019698820354109440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 18, 2018

Stephanie Savell calls these 'Credit Card Wars'. I like that characterization, think I might be able to use that in educating others about our situation.

The impact of this new way of funding wars? Most of us know it's being charged forward, and that we will all eventually be asked to pay.

Who are the real winners in this fail though?

Savell gets into specifics . I was surprised at how much of this war debt is foreign owned.

Worth a read ....

Her conclusions:

Pressing for a real war budget, though, is not only a mechanism to alert Americans to the effects (on them) of the wars their government is fighting. It is also a potential lever through which citizens could affect the country’s foreign policy and pressure elected officials to bring those wars to an end. Some civic groups and activists from across the political spectrum have indeed been pushing to reduce the Pentagon budget, bloated by war, corruption, and fear-mongering. They are, however, up against both the power of an ascendant military-industrial complex and wars that have been organized, in their funding and in so many other ways, not to be noticed.

Those who care about this country’s economic future would be remiss not to include today’s war financing strategy among the country’s most urgent fiscal challenges. Anyone interested in improving American democracy and the well-being of its people should begin by connecting the budgetary dots. The more money this country spends on military activities, the more public coffers will be depleted by war-related interest payments and the less public funding there will be for anything else. In short, it’s time for Americans worried about living in a country whose inequality gap could soon surpass that of the Gilded Age to begin paying real attention to our “credit-card wars.”

Some great links in there for those who might take the time to educate themselves on the specifics, just in case anyone would like to prepare to argue against those who will call for a possible war with Iran.