OSAMA BIN LADEN: ECONOMIC ILLITERATE I’ve always heaped scorn on the notion that war is good for the economy; it’s the height of fallacious economic reasoning to think that a practice which destroys tons of equipment and hundreds of young men is an economic boon. But Osama Bin Laden’s equally wrong if he thinks that this war is going to weaken our economy

Bin Laden also suggested that the huge sums of money Washington spends on homeland security and the military serve his agenda of weakening the U.S. economy.

“All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration,” bin Laden said. “All that we have to do is to send two mujaheddin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses, without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.”

He added: “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

Iraq and Afghanistan together have cost us less than $300 billion, including the money Bush is going to ask for next year. In the same period, the US economy will have grossed about 36 trillion dollars, meaning that the war will have cost us less than 1% of our income.

If Osama really wants to gut the US budget, he’s going to need to try something more drastic, like opening up a chain of Medicare clinics. His efforts so far haven’t even done that much damage to the deficit, much less the US economy.