Yesterday, the bombing of ISIL targets in Syria started in earnest.. Even though there is stated coalition to take on this task, right now it seems that the US is doing the heavy lifting. No surprise, I imagine. I’m interested in this question posed by Andrew Sullivan: Does The GOP Really Give A Shit About The Debt?:
I mean: where are the fiscal conservatives now? The ISIS campaign is utterly amorphous and open-ended at this point – exactly the kind of potentially crippling government program Republicans usually want to slash. It could last more than three years (and that’s what they’re saying at then outset); the cost is estimated by some to be around $15 billion a year, but no one really knows. The last phase of the same war cost, when all was said and done, something close to $1.5 trillion – and our current travails prove that this was one government program that clearly failed to achieve its core original objectives, and vastly exceeded its original projected costs.
If this were a massive $1.5 trillion infrastructure project for the homeland, we’d be having hearing after hearing on how ineffective and crony-ridden it is; there would be government reports on its cost-benefit balance; there would be calls to end it tout court. But a massive government program that can be seen as a form of welfare dependency for the actual countries – Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Kurdistan – facing the crisis gets almost no scrutiny at all. And what scrutiny it gets is entirely due to partisanship and the desire to portray this president as effectively useless.
For all of the fearmongering and the saber-rattling coming from these so-called fiscal conservatives, there is no discussion on how to pay for this adventure. None whatsoever. And the media doesn’t help here — I have never, ever seen anyone ask John McCain or Lindsay Graham how the country pays for all of the military intervention they want. Because if they cared about the debt and curbing deficit spending, we’d be in the middle of discussing a tax increase to pay for this thing.
We’ve talked about this here and here, but now that we are officially bombing Syria (we’ve been bombing Iraq for awhile), what do you think?