iannis
Musty Nester
I often wonder where we'd be right now if a decade ago we stopped and said, fuck iraq, let's just take that money and shove it into nasa and the private space industry. All 1.7 trillion... man, where would we be right now...
I reckon we'd be about the same place with fewer crippled veterans.
On the whole it was Financial Sector shenannigans, overproduction of Housing, and corporate malfeasance that fucked us so hard. Iraq was, in retrospect, a completely wasteful campaign and irredeemable by almost any metric. But maybe, and i'm just saying maybe, it distracted from other looming problems.
Taking that industry and putting it somewhere else? Maybe we could have pushed 2008 back into 2018. Maybe not though. Too big to fail was already a thing before Iraq. Maybe the distraction that Iraq caused prolonged the inevitable. Maybe 2008 happens in 2006 if we have everyone looking at banks and domestic investment instead of bombs and America'ing the fuck out of dune coons.
But I do think it's pretty much inarguable that we would have been better off building our own roads and schools than blowing up Iraqi ones and rebuilding them for them. I do think would have been a wiser political investment.
The oil shock might not have happened. Of course, it still might have.
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