"Politicians saying that the Iraq war was a mistake doesn't begin to get at the hundreds of thousands of lives lost," O'Brien said. "I think there's no question that the war in Iraq led to the creation of what we now call ISIS, and the struggles in Syria. You can draw a pretty clear causal line between the invasion of Iraq and the [foreign policy] challenges that we face today, not to mention the collapse of our own economy and the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been killed. I think it's fair to say that there's very little of our current political situation abroad or at home that hasn't been dramatically negatively impacted by [Iraq's] invasion."
... says Perry O'Brien of the social justice organisation Beyond the Choir
'Military spending accounts for more than 50 percent of all US discretionary spending, according to the National Priorities Project. President Obama's fiscal 2017 budget includes a proposed Pentagon budget of $582.7 billion, up from a defense budget of $580.3 billion for fiscal 2016. An analysis of the largest defense budgets in 2015 by the International Institute for Strategic Studies shows that US defense spending easily dwarfs all other countries, individually, and is almost as much as 14 other countries' budgets combined. Antiwar vets on the campaign trail argue that even just cutting the US military budget by a small percentage would provide the US public with more social services."
.....Writes Candice Bernd, TRUTH-OUT
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