http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080310/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_war_costs

Economists estimating that military spending on Iraq is about 12 billion USD a MONTH, closing in on a TRILLION dollars since 2003. How much IS a trillion dollars? How many Surabaya short times would that buy?

That would buy you most of Surabaya.

Did you see that Japan just passed the trillion mark in reserves? Disgruntled Republican, AZ

Well, at $8 a pop (let's pretend the dollar was still strong), that could buy you 1.25 billion short times in Surabaya. Or you could just purchase all of eastern Java. You could probably get Surabaya for a mere 100 billion.

Let's see there are about 105 million males in the US above 18 years old. A trillion dollars would buy each of them 952 pieces of Surabaya ass over the five year period in question. That would have gotten each of these American men laid every other day for that time period. Of course I am throwing gay guys into the mix, if they were excluded would mean even more ass for the straight guys.

And if they all got laid every other day, they'd vote democrat...

Blasphemous soul that I am, I have often said that if every muslim guy got laid on a regular basis, terrorism, suicide bombings, and the notion of martyrdom would disappear from the face of this earth.

So a feasible peace plan for the middle east would be simply to start paying for all their young males to visit brothels on a regular basis. The cost would be significantly less than the $1 trillion we've blown so far, and would create much good will toward the US!

>military spending on Iraq is about 12 billion USD a MONTH

Guesstimating a population about 300 million, that's about $40 a month for every man, woman and child in the country.

>closing in on a TRILLION dollars since 2003

And that works out to about $3300 for everyone in the country.

And what did we get for our money? Well, GW got revenge for Saddam trying to kill his daddy. And we got a lot of recruiting fodder for Al Qaeda. And we got several thousand of America's fine servicemen (and women) killed.

What we don't seem to have is anything resembling a stable Iraq, nor do we have an Iraqi populace that likes America. I also suspect that in the end we'll have a theocratically ruled Iraq, sympathetic to the Ayatollahs in Iran.

Thanks GW!

Actually Murasaki, the first thing they need to be taught is that doing virgins is more work than it is worth. 72 virgins (or however, many) after "matyrdom" would not be heaven, it would be hell.