“Opportunity cost” can be the result of a happy decision or a heartbreaking one. It is the cost of not buying the Audi because you decided on the Ferrari. It’s the cost of not paying the rent, so the family can afford food and medicine this month.

How would the state of Minnesota spend an extra $17.9 billion today during its budget crisis? We’ll never know, because that amount of Minnesotans tax dollars is already spent. It bought our share of the Iraq war. Without the Iraq war, those dollars could have stayed in our pockets or been returned to support our state and city services.

Instead of being able to allocate those funds for health care, roads, nursing homes and schools, Minnesotans paid the Internal Revenue Service nearly $18 billion for our share of what many see as an unnecessary, ill conceived and immoral war sold to the American public with misinformation that Iraq played a role in the 9-11 attacks and harbored weapons of mass destruction aimed at the United States.

The question of what Minnesota could do, instead, with its tax contribution to that war is especially relevant in the face of Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s most recently proposed budget cuts.

The supplemental budget Pawlenty offered last Monday proposes a $250 million cut from state aid to local governments, $347 million from health and human services, $47 million from higher education and $181 million from other state programs and agencies. Meanwhile the governor would reduce state revenue with a 20 percent decrease in the corporate tax rate.

Piling on the pain, the governor also requested that his decision last summer to “unallot” $2.7 million for school districts and other government agencies be ratified by the legislature. The result would be that the dollars supposed to arrive a year late would simply not arrive at all.

General Assistance Medical Care, which about 70,000 Minnesotans rely upon for medical services, is scheduled to end March 31. Of that number about 90 percent live on less than $203 a month, a quarter are homeless and 60 percent are chemically dependent or mentally ill. About one-third have ongoing medical problems. The governor has proposed decreasing state health insurance for 20,000 childless adults by changing eligibility from 250 percent of the federal poverty limit to 75 percent.

Cities and school districts all over Minnesota and every other state are struggling with reduced services, while community leaders try to figure out what to cut next.

Ironically, the national Tea Party Movement protests the money the government might spend to improve health care for Americans, but I haven’t seen one tea-bag sign objecting to the nearly $1 trillion spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nope, no peace flags fly in those marches.

They’d allocate not an additional dollar for health care but let’s keep the Pentagon funded, soldiers employed, the military industrial complex turning out weapons, and security contractors like Xe Services LLC (Blackwater) hiring. Are our decisions to fight wars largely economic? Is war supposed to be good for America, no matter the cost in soldiers’ lives and limbs? No matter the cost to America’s integrity and reputation in the world? No matter the opportunity costs of giving up decent living standards for our people here at home?

In Afghanistan, the U.S. finds itself, once again, supporting the rule of a corrupt and incompetent government, lacking the respect of its people. This is not unlike our interventions, supporting the governments of Somoza in Nicaragua, Diem in South Vietnam, Pinochet in Chile and the Shah in Iran.

The U.S. is committed to years more in Afghanistan where Taliban are scarce on the ground and the prospect of building a functional, self-sustaining central democracy in a tribal culture is about as likely as doing the same on Mars. What would victory look like here?

With any luck it will look as good as the nearly unnoticed-at-home withdrawal of troops from Iraq, where in June last year soldiers stopped independently patrolling major Iraqi cities. After early March parliamentary elections, numbers there are scheduled to be down to around 50,000 American non-combat troops, from the 160,000 at the heat of the Bush-era “surge.” Most of the remaining troops are in the business of shutting down and transporting 1.5 million pieces of equipment.

Polls in Arab populations show that removing its military presence in Iraq is the single most important act the U.S. could take to improve our relations there. It will help reverse the terrorist recruitment against America that was fertilized by atrocities such as Abu Gharib.

So, this is success.

At home we are committed to care for the profoundly wounded survivors of these wars. They did the jobs we asked of them. Their sacrifices resulted from our decisions. Every life lost, every head injury from an IED, every damaged family—these too are the price of America’s wars in the Middle East. These, too, represent an opportunity cost. I can only hope that America will leave Afghanistan as quickly as possible, before the cost rises.