Now the "100 Years In Iraq" Makes Sense...
It's funny how you find answers to one question by looking for something completely different elsewhere. I was checking out an article on askmen.com entitled, "5 Things You Didn't Know: The Cold War" and the first "thing" hit me like a ton of bricks:
Got that? Now the whole "McCain says we can be in Iraq for 100 years" thing makes much more since. To him, Bush, Cheney and other warmongering conservatives, the conflict in Iraq is merely an evolution of the Cold War...and since we were able to pay for that with little complaining, they figure Iraq shouldn't be anything worth crying about.
So in short: Iraq = New Cold War. But since it gets hot (really violent) and cold (cease-fires) so often, let's call it "The Thermostat War" for the time being.
1- It cost the U.S. about $8 trillion
Eminent foreign relations historian Walter LaFeber has put the U.S. military expenditures bill for the Cold War at around $8 trillion. This is a reasonable figure when you take into consideration wars in Korea and Vietnam; intervention in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, Grenada, and elsewhere; psychological warfare through covert CIA operations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Radio Free Europe; and, of course, the research, development, testing, and construction of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons (at a high point in the late 1960s, both the U.S. and the USSR were each spending $50 million a day on those weapons).
By way of comparison, the U.S. is currently spending roughly $8 billion per month on the war in Iraq. Money spent on the Cold War could fund that operation for another 80 years.
Got that? Now the whole "McCain says we can be in Iraq for 100 years" thing makes much more since. To him, Bush, Cheney and other warmongering conservatives, the conflict in Iraq is merely an evolution of the Cold War...and since we were able to pay for that with little complaining, they figure Iraq shouldn't be anything worth crying about.
So in short: Iraq = New Cold War. But since it gets hot (really violent) and cold (cease-fires) so often, let's call it "The Thermostat War" for the time being.
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