In fighting wars, do the math

This letter to the editor appeared in The Record (Bergen Co. NJ) on July 29, 2011 

Recently, a friend of mine, also a retired teacher from Paterson, e-mailed with some information about the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I kind of put it aside. However, when I had some free time I took up his challenge and did the math, as he suggested.

My friend contended that if you spent $1 million a day from the time Jesus Christ was born to the present, you wouldn't have spent as much as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 10 years. I multiplied 365 by 2,010, which gave me a total of 734,154 days (503 leap years). Multiplied by $1 million, I came up with $734.2 billion, which is more than half of what we have spent on the Iraq-Afghanistan wars ($1.3 trillion and counting). It's also a little more than half of what the Department of Defense gobbled up in two years.

It seems incredible that we're spending that kind of money on wars of choice and weapons to fight an enemy that no longer exists, the Soviet Union, while we're cutting money to things we desperately need here at home, like health care, education and public transportation.

As Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, "Any nation that continuously spends more on weapons of defense rather than uplifting its citizens is a nation approaching spiritual death." I would add that we reached that point many years ago, and we're now in the middle of financial and political death.

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower, a retired professional military man, had these thoughts: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

I hope readers will encourage their representatives in Washington to try doing the math for once.

Ken Dalton
July 20

The writer is president of Veterans For Peace, Chapter 21, in New Jersey.