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Among the most bizarre symptoms of the blindness is the tendency of most deficit hawks to become big spenders on Iraq and Afghanistan, at least until lately. The direct costs of the war, which is to say those unfunded costs in each year's budget, now come to Si.23 trillion, or $444.6 billion for Afghanistan and $791.4 billion for Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project. But that's another sleight-of-hand, when one considers the so-called indirect costs like long-term veterans' care. Leading economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes recently testified to Congress that their previous estimate of S4 to $6 trillion in ultimate costs was conservative. Nancy Youssef, of McClatchy Newspapers in D.C., in my opinion the best war reporter of the decade, wrote recently that "it’s almost impossible to pin down just what the United States spends on war." The president him self expressed "sticker shock," according to Woodward's book, when presented cost projections during his internal review of 2009. The Long War casts a shadow not only over our economy and future budgets, but our unborn children's future as well. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate lies, obfusca tions and scandalous accounting techniques. We are victims of an information warfare strategy waged deliberately by the Pentagon. As Gen. Stanley McChrystat said much too candidly in February, 201U, "This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants." David Kilcullen, once the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, defines "international information operations as part of counterinsurgency." Quoted in Counterinsurgency in 2010, Kilcullen said the mil itary officer’s goal is to achieve a "unity of perception manage ment measures targeting the increasingly influential spectators' gallery of the international community." This’new "war of perceptions," relying on naked media manipulation such as the treatment of media commentators as 'message amplifiers' but atso high-technology information warfare, only highlights the vast importance of the ongoing WikiLeaks whistle-blowing campaign against the global secrecy establishment. Consider just what we have learned about Iraq and Afghanistan because of WikiLeaks: tens of thousands of civil ian casualties in Iraq never before disclosed; instructions to U.S. troops not to investigate torture when conducted by IJ.S. allies; the existence of Task Force 373, carrying out night raids in Afghanistan; the CIA’s secret army of 3,000 mercenaries; private parties by DynCorp featuring trafficked boys as enter tainment; and an Afghan vice president carrying $52 million in a suitcase. The efforts of the White House to prosecute Julian Assange and persecute Pfc. Bradley Manning in military prison should be of deep concern to anyone believing in the public's right to know. The news that this is not a physical war but mainly one of perceptions will not be received well among American military families or Afghan children, which is why a responsible citizen must rebel first and foremost against The Official Story. That simple act of resistance necessarily leads to study as part of critical practice, which is essential to the recovery of a demo cratic self and a democratic society. Read, for example, this early martial line of Rudyard Kipling, the English poet of the white man's burden: "When you're left wounded on Afghanistan's plains and the women come out to cut up what remains/just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/ And go to your God like a soldier." Years later, after Kipling's beloved son was killed in World War I and his remains never recovered, the poet wrote: "If any quest’on why we died/ Tell them because our fathers lied." Tom Hayden After more than 50 years of activism, politics and writing. Tom Hayden is a leading voice for ending the wars in Afghanistan. Iraq and Pakistan and reforming politics through a more participatory democracy. Pt. 2 of his editorial will be published next week. 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