We are all asking ourselves, why is the United States not getting its money's worth out of Aghanistan?  I think we can, but we need a draft to really profit from these ventures and a military that is self-sustaining.  What we have instead is this corporate boondoggle that has a one-way benefit for corporations and does nothing for this country, here at home.  Now, before I get accused of being pro-war, please know I am not convinced we need a massive, permanent presence in Afghanistan.  I think we should have our Special Forces doing the work with a few support posts.  We should eliminate Al-quaeda and get Bin Laden.  When he is brought to justice,  we will have completed our mission.  It's clear.  It's concise, and it's really about the only point justifying why we should care about what happens to an unsophisticated, tribal region barely comprising anything representative of a nation in the 21st century.  We should probably care about the drug traffic too, but that's the poison killing Eastern Europe, who has never been warmly received in the US anyway.  Before I get too side-tracked, let's talk about getting our money's worth out of this war.

We have all heard the arguments about World War II and how it was the War that brought this nation out of the Great Depression.  World War II put people to work!  Of course, it was also convenient we were pretty much the only nation with a working industry to rebuild Europe at the time, their having pretty much levelled each other's cities and factories in that conflict.  But whichever reason one chooses, and it was probably both, the means of recovering from the Depession was employment.  So why are we not getting that benefit from our latest war?  I mean, if Reagan could replicate a war-time economy without an actual war, why can't we get it done with two?!?  Ask Thomas Friedman!   

What has happened is that we have shipped traditional military jobs overseas.  Rather then have American military personnel supporting the troops, we have foreign workers providing services.  The bulk of money passing through most companies goes to payroll.  So if we put billions of dollars into a company and they spend the money paying foreign workers to do the work, we get no return on investment for the US. None of the payroll money goes into this economy. In fact, even the companies that were American, as the perfectly reasonable and natural result of being a profit-driven, multi-national corporation, have gone overseas.  So we are losing the entry of those profits into the US economy as well.  Take Halliburton, the company formerly run by our former Vice President whose name causes me to see red and so will go unmentioned.  Halliburton has profited enormously from the wars.  It's raking in so much money in the Middle East, it has opened a "Second" headquarters in the United Arab Emirates, a boutique nation that resembles the Cayman Islans in a lot of ways, but without being an actual island surrounded by the ocean.  This tax shelter is now the home of not just the "Second" headquarters, but also the home of it's CEO.

The greatness of the US was at an apex after World War II because everyone was working, or had worked for a couple years at least during World War II.  Now we have two world wars and no work.  I express the wars as world wars because most of the players in the first two were fighting with us early in these conflicts, except now, due to a complete and total diplomatic collapse, we fight in Iraq alone now, having lost the Coalition of the Willing, and very few nations remain fighting with us in Afghanistan.  To the military industrial complex, the war profiteers, this is most excellent.  They would prefer NOT to share the spoils of war, but to the American people it puts an even greater burden on us, and that burden is soon to be increased exponentially, if we do escalate the war in Afghanistan.

The question I am asking is, since most would agree we are going to turn up the heat in Afghanistan regardless of the public oppositions to it, why don't we spread the wealth around and put the American people to work like we did in the middle of the last century.  Get people into a military that cooks its own food, cleans its own latrines, builds its own bases top to bottom, inside and out, and completely supports itself?  There was a time when getting a military contract meant you won the award because you had the best product.  Getting your hands on any military equipment was getting something of quality.  Today, the award goes to the lowest bidder and getting something from the military is to know that whoever decided buying this piece was worth the money was probably influenced in many spurious ways to come to that decision because the product is blatantly a piece of crap.

It just feels like someone else is fighting these wars, not the American people.  It seems like someone with dogged determination and the time to do so could reveal just how many jobs are given to foreign nationals to fight our wars.  How many contractors are actually American entities and how many are clearly not, and how many are standing on both sides of the For-U-or-Against-Us Line.  Isn't that how Bush described people, as for us or against us?  So is it a stretch to use that measure when looking at these contractors, whether they are helping or hurting the cause by taking more money then they are worth and providing products far from anything resembling quality?  Wasn't the benefit of war related to the money spent fighting that war because those monies circulated into the American economy?

This post rambles a bit and could certainly use a few footnotes and references and so forth, but it's intent is more of a starting point then an all-encompassing piece, to answer the question, "If wars are good for an economy, why are we suffering so greatly when we are involved in two?"  I think the answer is that our only involvement in the wars is only in paying for them and not in actually getting the jobs and profits cycled back to the country of origin, the USA.  It is within that cycle that a nation achieves economic benefits from war, not in sending those jobs overseas.  What we have in this war is a reflection of our present state of affairs with the rest of our commerce.  We have shipped the jobs overseas and the only ones profitting from these enterprises are the wealthy, who now pay less taxes then ever and have probably moved their homes overseas as well.  Of course, this argument presuposes there is a just reason for fighting these wars in the first place, but I am surpassing any moral imperative to make an economic argument, and doesn't economics thrive in a reaml devoid of morality anyway?