Americans ignorant as Europeans protest US wars

While Americans struggle to answer how long the US has been in Iraq or Afghanistan, how much money has been spent, and how many lives lost, Europeans feeling the cost of US wars at home take to the streets in protest. In the US, despite two combat missions costing thousands of lives, more than a trillion dollars, and nearly ten years, for many average Americans the realities of US wars aren't hitting home.

“I’m trying to think Afghanistan, Iraq, I don’t know if it’s over or still going," said Rene Moreno when interviewed on the street in Times Square, a California resident visiting New York.The details, for instance, how long the US has been fighting in Afghanistan aren't known.

Still polls show 62 percent of Americans are now against the war in Afghanistan. More prominent voices are rising up against the US military stance in the world. “We’re at the sundown as an imperialist power and we can’t have credit card imperialism, we can’t be the policeman of the world anymore because we can’t afford it, we’re going to have to cut defense dramatically," proclaimed David Stockman, former budget director for President Ronald Reagan, in an interview with ABC. While Bill Maher on his TV show "Real Time said: “We have an empire and over half a million of our troops in other people’s countries.”

This argument doesn’t appear to pass muster with lawmakers in Washington. But with hundreds of military bases spread over the world and more than half of the US discretionary budget spent on defense, amidst a sluggish economy and $13 trillion dollars of debt, increasingly critics see it coming at this price.

Discontent with US policies has now spread overseas where in Portugal thousands of protesters took to the streets during the NATO conference there to protest against US military bases, and against European defense spending on US wars .

For more: Americans ignorant as Europeans protest US wars — RT