Roots Action & Richard Sisk / New York Daily News – 2011-03-29 22:37:24
http://rootsaction.org/featured-actions/63-bring-our-libya-war-dollars-home
ACTION ALERT: Stop Spending US Dollars on War in Libya
Bring our Libya War Dollars Home
Roots Action
Without the authorization of Congress that the Constitution and the War Powers Act require, the President has taken the nation into yet another war. Best case predictions are that US military action in Libya will cost over $1 billion; one Republican senator says it may have already hit that mark.
With teachers, nurses and essential services being cut at home, can our country afford another war?
We care about civilians being brutalized by dictators. That’s why we question the billions in weapons our country is providing to dictatorships in Yemen, Bahrain and the rest of the region — including (until earlier this year) Gadaffi’s government in Libya.
Our government switched with hardly a pause from arming Gadaffi to bombing Libya. War is not the only option for assisting people, but it is the most costly in both blood and treasure.
President Obama on Monday said he would “never hesitate” to use the US military unilaterally to defend “interests” and “values,” including “maintaining the flow of commerce.” Fear of exactly that led the founders of this republic to give Congress the exclusive power to declare war.
Click here to ask your representative and senators to curtail funds for making war in Libya.
THE LETTER
Without the authorization of Congress that the Constitution and the War Powers Act require, the President has taken the nation into yet another war. Best case predictions are that US military action in Libya will cost over $1 billion.
We care about civilians being brutalized by dictators. That’s why we question the billions in weapons our country is providing to dictatorships in Yemen, Bahrain and the rest of the region — including (until earlier this year) Gadaffi’s government in Libya. The US government switched with hardly a pause from arming Gadaffi to bombing Libya.
You, our representatives in Congress, were not given an opportunity to vote on this new military action. If this precedent is allowed to stand, Congress will be powerless to say no to wars in future years.
Please cosponsor measures to curtail funding of this military action, such as the House amendment that Congressmembers Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Pete Stark, Tom McClintock, Lynn Woolsey and Walter Jones are expected to introduce.
Please forward this email far and wide.
Sincerely,
David, Aimee, Sarah and the RootsAction Team
RootsAction is an independent organization dedicated to creating a fair economy and ending militarism.
Cost of Libya Mission Nears
$1 Billion, but Khadafy’s Country
Not ‘a Vital Interest for the US’
WASHINGTON (March 28, 2011) — The taxpayers’ bill for operations in Libya is headed to at least $1 billion in a conflict that the Pentagon chief said Sunday was not “a vital interest for the US.” Hundreds of millions have already been spent to take out Moammar Khadafy’s air defenses, bomb his tank columns and set up a no-fly zone, and lawmakers predicted a tough fight when the military comes to Congress for supplemental funding.
“Estimates are that about $1 billion has already been spent on an undeclared war in Libya,” said Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), a respected GOP voice on foreign policy. “Some would say only hundreds of millions,” Lugar said on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” “but who knows how long this goes on.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Clinton said that President Obama will address the concerns of Congress on the duration and costs of the third US war in the Mideast in an address to the nation on Monday night.
But Gates raised more questions when he said that Libya was not high on the list of US national security concerns. “I don’t think it’s a vital interest for the US,” Gates said, but he added that Libya was part of a Mideast region that was a vital interest. The costs for Libyan operations were building rapidly, and Gates said he could not predict how long the operations will last.
The opening barrage from offshore surface ships and subs involved more than 140 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a cost of at least $1 million apiece, according to military officials. The F-15 Eagle fighter that crashed last Monday, with both pilots ejecting safely, cost about $30 million, and the F-15s and F-16 Fighting Falcon jets maintaining the no-fly zone cost about $10,000 an hour to operate.
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has projected that the costs of Libya operations could exceed $300 million weekly. The bill could go up considerably should the US begin arming and supplying the rebels, but Clinton said no decisions had been made on military aid to the opposition.
Under US air cover, the rebels have turned the tables on Khadafy’s forces, pushing westward to take several key oil towns along the coast, setting their sites on Sirte, Khadafy’s birthplace. Coalition forces bombed both Sirte and Tripoli heavily overnight.
Gates also charged that Khadafy was planting bodies at sites bombed by the coalition to make the US look bad. “We do have a lot of intelligence reporting about Khadafy taking the bodies of the people he’s killed and putting them at the sites where we’ve attacked,” Gates said on CBS’ “Face The Nation.”
rsisk@nydailynews.com
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