Compare/contrast

National Security Adviser General James Jones, on General McChrystal's plan to add 40,000+ troops in Afghanistan

"Generals always ask for more troops. Take it from me," Jones told SPIEGEL in an interview. ..."You can keep on putting troops in, and you could have 200,000 troops there and Afghanistan will swallow them up as it has done in the past."

Obama's Afghan Plan: About 40K More Troops

The president still has more meetings scheduled on Afghanistan, but informed sources tell CBS News he intends to give Gen. Stanley McChrystal most, if not all, the additional troops he is asking for.

McChrystal wanted 40,000 and the president has tentatively decided to send four combat brigades plus thousands more support troops. A senior officer says "that's close to what [McChrystal] asked for." All the president's military advisers have recommended sending more troops.

Whew, that was a close one. For a second there I was worried we weren't going to escalate the war, or if we were, we weren't going to escalate it to the satisfaction of our generals. Dodged that bullet. We did, not the troops. Ironically they'll have to be dodging bullets now. Now the Obama Administration says that the CBS report is false because no final final decisions have been made, but does anyone think there's a chance this isn't happening? I thought so. I guess the real victory is that he didn't put in 200,000 troops to get swallowed up in there. Jones must have been preparing us for a worst case scenario.

For comparisons sake, this increase of 40,000 combat soldiers (plus the requisite addition in tens of thousands of support forces) will cost somewhere in the range of $80 billion extra a year for Afghanistan. Doesn't that make you feel great? $80 billion a year is cheap when you want to use it to extend and escalate a war. But when you want to use that money to get people cheaper health care and do so in a way that decreases the deficit, then that same $80 billion a year is an onerous deficit burden on America that our children (someone think of the children) will have to pay off. I'm no budgetary expert, but I think it has something to do with a part in the preamble of the Constitution that says "War money don't count as real money." Who are we to argue with the founding fathers?