{"id":2338,"date":"2005-09-01T15:36:37","date_gmt":"2005-09-01T22:36:37","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-09-01T15:36:37","modified_gmt":"2005-09-01T22:36:37","slug":"opportunity-costs-iraq-and-katrina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2005\/09\/01\/opportunity-costs-iraq-and-katrina\/","title":{"rendered":"Opportunity Costs: Iraq and Katrina"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=http:\/\/www.theagitator.com\/archives\/025203.php#025203>Radley Balko on Katrina<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>The federal government has again failed at the one thing it&#8217;s actually supposed to do: Protect us from outside threats. Perversely, this failure is the direct result of a fool&#8217;s errand carried out in response to the massive failure of four years ago.<\/p>\n<p><b>Shoring up the levees and water pumps would have cost a mere $250 million, about a day-and-a-half of wartime operations in Iraq.<\/b><\/ul>\n<p>Sickening. <\/p>\n<p>Balko writes at the end of his post, &#8220;Now&#8217;s not the time to score petty political points,&#8221; but I don&#8217;t see how mentioning the massive misallocation of tax dollars that left New Orleans defenseless is a petty political point. Who&#8217;s scoring <i>petty<\/i> political points? I dunno \u2013 maybe Fox News anchors screeching that <a href=http:\/\/www.theagitator.com\/archives\/025194.php#025194>the French are enjoying our misery<\/a>. Maybe another key Bush constituency proclaiming that New Orleans is suffering <a href=http:\/\/www.repentamerica.com\/pr_hurricanekatrina.html>because God hates fags<\/a>. (Surely you&#8217;re not surprised by <a href=http:\/\/www.repentamerica.com\/news6.php>this group&#8217;s allies<\/a>.) <\/p>\n<p>But a frank discussion of the opportunity costs of imperialism? Under the current circumstances, only a nation of imbeciles would avoid it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Radley Balko on Katrina: The federal government has again failed at the one thing it&#8217;s actually supposed to do: Protect us from outside threats. Perversely, this failure is the direct result of a fool&#8217;s errand carried out in response to the massive failure of four years ago. Shoring up the levees and water pumps would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2338"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}