Federico Bordonaro

Per James Sterngold, opinionista del San Francisco Chronicle, l’economia americana è da annoverarsi tra le “vittime della guerra“:

“Osama (bin Laden) doesn’t have to win; he will just bleed us to death,” said Michael Scheuer, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA who led the pursuit of bin Laden and recently retired after writing two books critical of the Clinton and Bush administrations. “He’s well on his way to doing it.”

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, has estimated that the Korean War cost about $430 billion and the Vietnam War cost about $600 billion, in current dollars. According to the latest estimates, the cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $700 billion.

Put simply, critics say, the war is not making the United States safer and is harming U.S. taxpayers by saddling them with an enormous debt burden, since the war is being financed with deficit spending.

Sono molti a pensare, peraltro, che il debito statunitense, pubblico e privato, sia fuori controllo e non sia sostenibile. (C’è però da notare che tale posizione è di tanto in tanto ripetuta ma che, finora, l’ipotesi “crollista” non si sia mai verificata). Di sicuro, diversi osservatori ritengono i costi della guerra ormai inaccettabili:

“The objective has always been to install a friendly government,” said Charles V. Peña, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, a libertarian think tank. “Are the costs worth that? No, because it’s not something we can accomplish for the long term. It’s just going to continue to drain the American taxpayer. I don’t see how it’s going to get better. It’s only going to get worse.”