LETTER

Cost of Trump’s missile strike

 

Now, we know. According to an expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the replacement cost for the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles recently dumped by the US on an air base in Syria: $89 million.

In the context of America’s wars, $89 million is a laughable sum. But what would a figure like that mean if spent domestically rather than on a non-significant strike in Syria. That sum is well more than half of the $149 million budget for the National Endowment for the Arts and also of the $149 million budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities, both of which the Trump administration would like to wipe out. It represents one-fifth of the $445 million the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, also on Trump’s kill list, gets from the federal government. That single strike also represents about a thirtieth of the $2.6 billion his administration wants to cut from the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, and about a sixtieth of the $5.8 billion that it plans to cut from the National Institutes of Health.

So each time those Tomahawks are launched, or American planes or drones take off over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Somalia, or the next US troops head for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or elsewhere and those millions of dollars start to add up to billions and finally trillions, just think: that’s the arts, the sciences, public health, and environmental safety that they’re destroying, not the enemy. Think of that as part of the “collateral damage” produced by our ally’s never-ending wars.

Daniel Surry
Ottawa