Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Trickle down costs of Iraq war begin to hurt


The Iraq War's chickens are coming home to roost.

Many states are in full revolt against Washington's plan to require a standardized national driver's license that the Department of Homeland Security claims is needed to prevent forgeries and foil terrorists using counterfeit identification.

Idaho may join the opposition. Gov. Butch Otter, who co-sponsored the federal legislation creating Real ID when he was in Congress, now has second thoughts, too.

Little wonder. The nationwide costs of converting driver's licenses and of confirming personal data of licensees is estimated to be $11 billion, all to be born by the states. This is another of those unfunded mandates from Washington.

Opposition also is mounting because license data would be fed into a central archive whose security may be questionable.

Unless Congress relents, licenses not complying with federal standards could not be used as IDs for boarding an airliner, opening some bank accounts or entering federal buildings.

Real ID is but one of many war costs trickling down to ordinary Americans. Other examples of those human and financial costs:

· Nearly half of the 3,100 GIs killed in Iraq are from towns of fewer than 25,000 population; one in five of the dead were from towns of fewer than 5,000. William O'Hare of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute complains that the rural American "is being asked to pay a bigger price for this military adventure."

· Hundreds of National Guardsmen and reservists deployed to Iraq have lost their small businesses because of extended duty tours. Thousands of municipal jobs are vacant because government workers have been called to service.

· The Washington Post discovered that the Department of Defense has been using a rat-infested, moldy former hotel near Washington's famed Walter Reed Hospital as an annex for military outpatients who have lost limbs in Iraq.

· The Pentagon estimates its military combat vehicles are either worn out or in short supply as the result of the war and will cost billions of dollars to replace or repair.

The costs of the Iraq war threaten funding for everything from highways and forests to medical care and research.

What to do?

Americans must weigh the costs versus the rewards of security programs like Real ID. The president and Congress must quit dithering and pilot a path out of the quagmire of Iraq with something better than meaningless congressional resolutions that call for an end to the war or a plan that simply calls for more war with no end in sight.




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