The cost of war is astounding—the sheer numbers of lives lost, including families, women, children, the billions of tax dollars spent, and the increased suffering as life-sustaining government programs like healthcare and food are cut to fund the cost of war. War, along with its loss of lives of our loved ones, soaring prices for necessities like gas and food, does not benefit the average American. Wars are fought for markets, global domination, and make huge profits for giant corporations and their stock holders.
“I saw a trillion dollars wasted in Vietnam,” says U.S. Navy Veteran Bruce Fenton on the Veterans For Peace Facebook page. The Vietnam War’s estimated $170 billion plus expenditures profited U.S. corporations tremendously. (The Collector). And the human cost was a staggering 58,220 U.S. soldiers dead plus 300,000 wounded, and approximately 1,100,000 Vietnamese soldiers and 2,000,000 civilians dead, plus 18 million wounded. (Britannica)
“They told us we’ve got to fight them over there or we will have to fight them over here,“ wrote veteran Fenton. To justify the war, “they told us they don’t value human life like we do and they hate us because we are free. These were all lies. I saw my fellow service members die. I saw friends lose part of their soul when they took lives. I saw people haunted by screams. I saw veterans kill themselves over the anguish of what they had seen and done . . . [there were] 22 veteran suicides a day for decades. This is why I have no tolerance for the same lies pushed by the same people for another iteration of the same stupidity.”
Now, the killings in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank continue, and we’re in an illegal, immoral war on Iran, a country that has never harmed our country (though we have bombed their country and also instituted a coup in 1953 to remove a democratically elected president who wanted to nationalize the oil in the interests of their people).
An estimated $1 to $2 billion a day in U.S. tax dollars is being spent for this war, supposedly to stop Iran from developing a nuclear program. Yet the U.S. intelligence community and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have not found evidence that Iran has an active nuclear weapons development program.
On the first day of the war, in the midst of negotiations, US-Israeli bombs began to drop. Raytheon, the major U.S. defense corporation, built the bombs that killed 168 children at a girls’ school.
To date, 3,300 to 3,540 Iranians are dead, along with a number of Americans. An estimated 1,700 of the Iranian dead are civilians, including children. “Sadly,” said Dr. Maryam Mirjafari, a pediatrician at Tehran’s Mofid Children’s Hospital ICU, “we have seen many children, even infants under six months old. Some, unfortunately, never even made it to the ICU. When they arrived, they were already deceased.” (Dawn News English).
Last year, instead of investing in social programs that help people make ends meet, the president and his friends in Congress passed a “Big Beautiful Bill,” that “cut taxes for the wealthy, slashed health insurance and food assistance for millions of Americans, and added billions in new spending for war and mass deportations.” (Common Dreams)
Recently, a woman told C-Span that due to her SNAP cuts she only has $60 a month to spend on food, adding, “I’m starving.” Medicaid cuts are projected to cause 1,000 to 50,000 additional deaths annually. Justification by government for these cuts to social programs is often because “they are unaffordable” —or “misused.” But there’s plenty of money for war, to build tortuous immigrant detention centers like Alligator Alcatraz and concentration-like camps for unhoused people.
Meanwhile, top U.S. defense companies like Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Northrop Grumman saw roughly $25-$30 billion in shareholder gains on the first day of Iran strikes. The top 100 oil and gas companies generated over $30 million in windfall profits every hour in the first month of the war. ExxonMobil is projected to gain $11 billion in windfall profits, adding $118 Billion in shareholder value. Shell is expected to gain $6.8 billion, assuming oil prices stay high. Shell earned $34 billion in the month following the war’s start. (The Guardian).
And now—Trump’s Pentagon is seeking $150-200 Billion more tax dollars for war!
Our nation is at a moral crossroads. The majority of people in our country do not want war, including the Iran war. People are protesting, pushing back against militarism, demanding negotiations, not bombs, and an end to violence in our name. They’re telling Congress “not one more dime for war in Iran, no bombs for Israel, and to get out of the Middle East.” A protester recently called out U.S. Rep. DeGette (D-CO) at a town-hall meeting, saying, “Shame on you! You just voted more money for Israel! Our name is on every bomb. You’re killing kids. Free Palestine.”
Millions see that no one is going to save us. We have to save ourselves.
A massive anti-war movement is in the making.
A world without war is possible.
