Taliban threatens to kill captured U.S. soldier

From what I saw about a month ago or so, Al Qaeda is supposedly running out of money, and real fast.  Granted, if it is true that Al Qaeda is broke then it's perhaps the greatest piece of financial news that has possibly ever been broken.  It kind of goes to prove that when it comes to making war, it's the dirty rotten capitalist countries that will always come out on top - because we can afford to.

Or can we?  The thing is that the national debt - and I do NOT mean the deficit, I mean the total amount of debt that our nation owes to creditors - has skyrocketed in the past 30 years, and it was given the greatest of gooses by Presidents Carter, Reagan, and both of the Bushes.  (It dipped a little under Clinton.) Why did it go up?  Well, it's pretty simple.  In the 60s, the military industrial complex began making massive amounts of profits from their involvement in the Vietnamese War.  They became major campaign contributors, and they enjoyed favor and record profits under Johnson and Nixon.  When the war ended, along with Nixon's tenure, something else went out the window - which was the American public's willingness to completely go along with a major military offensive.  Carter addressed their fears, along with Reagan, by promising massive spending in the military, especially with arms buildups, in order to both stimulate the redneck hawk crowd who seem to think a lot of people dying somewhere far far away and those of us who never benefit from these actions paying for it, and to appease their lobbyists to get campaign funding, beginning massive arms buildups, which continued unabated into the Clinton Presidency.  Spending in fact INCREASED after the fall of the Soviet Union (which was going to happen whether Reagan was elected or not, and the CIA knew it by 1977), and when Baby Bush decided that one war over 10,000 miles away wasn't good enough, we got the Second Iraq War, which was not only unconstitutional (the War Powers act is technically a violation of Article II of the Constitution, and technicalyl requires an amendment) but also terribly expensive.

Now no body wants to see our soldiers get hurt, and Al Qaeda is a legitimate threat that needs to be eliminated once and for all, and I have always been in nothing but support for our efforts there, but to address Iraq 1 and 2, Panama, Granada, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and every otehr large action (excepting Afghanistan) by our military since WW2 - we, the people, are the ones who pay for these wars with our taxes, and our children and grandchildren will be paying the tab on them for decades to come.  What have we gained in the mean time?  Nothing.  It has benefited we, the people, those who pay for the wars, and fight them, not one darn bit of good, nor will it ever.  Hopefully our brave men and women bring a swift end to the conflict with the defeat of Al Qaeda - and swiftly, and upon their return and the conclusion of the Iraq debacle, let's send a message to Congress that these kind of crass wars over nothing that cost American lives and trillions in American dollars that we will not tolerate it any more, as they have paid none of the cost, and we have paid for everything, in both the sweat of our backs producing our wages which are taxed, and with the blood of our sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, and cousins - which is far more precious than some cur in a suits' tenure and congressional pension or presidential pension, or Haliburton's shareholders.