Iraq Opportunity Costs

These are two stories from Newsvine from this week:

“President Bush will ask Congress for close to three-quarters of a trillion dollars in defense spending on Monday, including $245 billion to cover the cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and other elements of the “global war on terror,” senior administration officials said yesterday.”

“As of Saturday, Feb. 3, 2007, at least 3,096 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,480 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers.“

Now I’m not a political scientist, nor am I an economist; but I do understand the idea of opportunity cost.  American lives are being lost, and vast amounts of American money are being spent.  What, exactly, are the American people receiving in return?  OK, OK, I won’t discount the importance of an American presence in the Middle East.  As the #1 importer of Middle Eastern oil, we certainly have interests to protect.  But wouldn’t that money be better-spent developing strategies to get the US off foreign oil?  If it was a high-priority issue for the administration, it could be done; the technologies exist.

The point I’m trying to make is that for every dollar we sink into Iraq, we could be investing in our energy future as opposed to our energy present.  Not to mention the lives that would be saved by such an alternative.