$350 billion for what?

The war in Iraq has now cost $350 billion. Even in a best case scenario when adding in repair/replacement, we're not going to get out of there for less that $500 billion. (***and that's leaving out longterm healthcare.)

For some reason reading this article this morning, I harkened back to a post I wrote almost a year ago focusing on overall defense spending, but looking at the $350 billion Iraq pricetag, I think it applies there, too.

Just for examples' sake, let's cut my numbers above significantly and put together a mix of doctors and teachers. Let's say that the US made a worldwide commitment to send 50,000 American doctors abroad, and trained another 100,000 local doctors(figuring half the cost of US personnel.) And let's pick a random number of 125,000 US teachers with another 250,000 local teachers trained.

For $37.5 billion, about 7.5% of current military spending, our country could transform the world increasing world health substantially and also increasing the futures of hundreds of millions of children. The US, I would argue, would end up far more secure deploying 150,000 doctors and a 375,000 teachers around the world than we would be spending that 7.5% on a couple of weapons programs.

Seriously, forget about all the other cost/benefit around Iraq, if the US had dropped 150,000 doctors and 375,000 teachers throughout the Muslim world, wouldn't we be safer today?

Wouldn't the Arab middle have long ago seen America differently?

And, that's for about 1/4 of what Iraq has cost us so far each year.