Costs of War

Reported today at McClatchy:

As America inches closer to a decade of war, the cost increasingly is being questioned. People who years ago might have feared being called unpatriotic are lambasting the trillion dollars spent since 9/11.
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My comment:

It is a fraud that the wars have anything to do with fighting terrorism since the inconveniences caused to the terrorists are more than offset by the support they get from previously peaceful civilians who have been bombed and displaced and who have suffered losses of friends and family and livelihoods and who themselves must live in terror of more to come. These wars are actually the project of militarists seeking geopolitical gains such as curtailing the rising influence of China in South Asia or "isolating" Iran or simply having more bases in more countries in the region. The costs of these wars are not the costs of security, they are the costs of empire.