The piece by Mike Baker on costs of US wars lingering for over a century came to my notice in the presentation of Javier Martin’s book «La Casa de Saud» (Saud’s House) in Blanquerna, Madrid, on March 21, 2013. Efe’s international editor Alfonso Bauluz, a veteran in Spanish international journalism, mentioned the article as a very interesting overview, well documented, of a very old problem which no big power, specially the US, has been able to solve in a swift, just and effective way for past, present and future generations.

Reading just the first two paragraphs of Baker’s story brought to my mind excellent reports published by different think tanks one or two years ago on the cost of ten years of war just in Afghanistan and Iraq, and some older, much older, research published on the material and psychological consequences of the US Civil War  one century and a half after Lincoln closed that terrible chapter of US history.

At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.

The inmediate question, looking at these figures, for any minimally sensitive observer is how come, given the sacrifice imposed to so many for so long, leaders of very different ideological background, keep sending US armies abroad to make war most of the time not for defending vital national interests, but, as in Iraq’s case, as a result of imagined or invented threats never tested. As U.S. Sen. Patty Murray observes,