Last I heard the US GDP was sitting around 10 trillian/year.. 600 billion is 17% of that not 5%. And the reason why the GDP is so high is because the world uses the USD as the international global currency of trade.. If two countries want to trade they use the USD. This is generally accepted everywhere and the USD basically has the complete monopoly on this. This causes the USD to be in great demand, and also causes major world banks to stock huge amounts of USD in their reserves, which causes the value of the USD to go up, allowing the USD to have there outrageous deficit spending budgets that they do now.. The problem is that the one main reason for people to choose the USD as their trading currency, its rocklike stability, is progressively fading away.
In 2000 when the Euro was introduced it was trading at .80 per USD. it is now hovering close to 1.10.. That is a 30% increase in the past 3 years, 25% of that since 2001. And it isn't necessarily that the Euro is gaining, it is that the USD is falling. Mainly because of this chimp's, or its puppeteers' outrageous war efforts.
So what you have here is some countries switchinig to the Euro as their global trading currency, and when a country does this then the Global banks that they deal with now have to cash in all their USD that they had allocated for that one country and keep an equivalent reserve in Euros. This causes the demand for the USD to go down and the demand for the euro to go up, which causes a de-valuation of the USD, reducing its worth. Coincidentally, and quite ironicly Iraq was the first nation in OPEC to switch to the EURO as their global currency in 2000, for the reason of 'why should we trade in the currency of the enemy', a gamble that lost them money in 2000, but has made them a hefty profit as of late.
In 2004 the EU will be accepting 10 more nations into its body, putting the population in the EU to about 450 million(greater than the USA) and a GDP of 9.6 trillian(almost equal to that of the USA). With these 10 new countries the EU will be the worlds largest importer of Crude oil from OPEC, a fact that caused some OPEC countries in the latest convention in Vienna to seriously push for a unified switch in OPEC from the USD to the Euro.. If and when this happens the USD is predicted to drop in value upwards of 40%(not overnight of course) and inflation in the USA would reach equivalent levels..
As you can imagine this is a serious serious threat to the security of the United States, more than any terrorist ever would be. How do you prevent such a thing from happening? Well a good start would be to go in and occupy the country that made that first switch to Euros and change their trading currency back to the USD to provide a temporary boost to the USD.. Secondly you increase the crude production in that country to 7 times its current production in order to destroy OPEC, an alliance formed to create a maximum crude quota among the top petroleum countries, limiting their crude production in order to keep prices high, which would them destroy the chance that they would make a unified switch to the Euro, stabalising the USD for years to come.
Damn.. I can't believe I remembered all of that..
Go here if you want an in depth and longer, much longer version of what I just said
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html