Musing's musings

Madness

Just before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Dick Cheney went on Press the Meat and pooh-poohed Tim Russert's estimates of how much the war would cost:

MR. RUSSERT: Every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion, recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I can’t say that, Tim. There are estimates out there. It’s important, though, to recognize that we’ve got a different set of circumstances than we’ve had in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan you’ve got a nation without significant resources. In Iraq you’ve got a nation that’s got the second-largest oil reserves in the world, second only to Saudi Arabia. It will generate billions of dollars a year in cash flow if they get back to their production of roughly three million barrels of oil a day, in the relatively near future. And that flow of resources, obviously, belongs to the Iraqi people, needs to be put to use by the Iraqi people for the Iraqi people and that will be one of our major objectives.

As it turns out, Russert's estimate was pretty egregiously lowball. As of the time of this posting, the Iraq war has cost us more than $720 billion (at a rough estimate). The Afghanistan war that President Obama is ratcheting up in the latest of a long line of futile attempts by western colonial powers to control that particular neck of the woods, has cost us on the order of $270 billion. Total spending on those two wars since 2001 (including enforcement, logistics, etc.) is already more than $1 trillion.

According to the National Priorities Project, if we hadn't flushed that $1.05 trillion down the toilet, here are some of the things we could have gotten for the same amount of money:

• health care for 308,396,946 people for one year
• 22,599,968 public safety officers for one year
• 17,944,326 music and arts teachers for one year
• 132,716,897 one-year scholarships for university students
• Pell Grants ($5,550 each) for 188,536,667 university students
• 8,139,680 affordable housing units
• health care for one year for 461,193,337 children
• Head Start placements for 143,595,239 children for one year
• 17,188,969 elementary school teachers for one year
• 1,083,271,391 homes with renewable electricity for one year

(Note that each of those items costs around $1.05 trillion; unfortunately, we couldn't get all of them for that same amount.)

A few other things we could have gotten for $1.05 trillion, off the top of my head:

• a balanced budget;
• 105 years' worth of funding for basic research at the National Science Foundation at $10 billion per year, the level NSF's budget is projected to reach at the end of the current doubling process--in 2017;
• 33 years' worth of funding for health research at the National Institutes of Health, at current funding levels;
• 52.5 years' worth of NASA funding at its projected FY2011 level of $20 billion;
• 6 months' worth of free health care for everyone in the United States, assuming no economies of scale or other savings would be realized from a single-payer system, based on total costs in 2008;
• a year's worth of HIV medication for two-thirds of the approximately 30 million people infected with HIV worldwide, assuming $50,000 per person per year

It's long past time to end these senseless wastes of our national time, talent, and treasure. If for no other reason than that we can no longer afford them.

This picture is really worth a thousand words

That's our not-exactly fearless, soon-to-be-ex-leader, ducking at his press conference in Baghdad today to avoid the first of a pair of size-10 clodhoppers tossed his way by a correspondent for an Iraqi television station based in Cairo. According to press reports, as he threw the first shoe, the reporter shouted "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog”!" As he hurled the second shoe, he added, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq." Iraqi Prime Minister Bush's puppet Nuri al-Maliki had to block the second shoe to keep it from hitting Bush in the face, so I guess he really is good for something.

It's a perfect commentary on the defining catastrophe of the worst presidency to date in our history--and may it continue to define presidential suckitude for as long as the Republic shall last! God forbid we ever get a president worse than George W. Bush has been--because that would almost certainly involve the end of the Republic as well.

The good news, of course, is that he's more or less strutted and fretted his allotted hour on the stage, and we're within a few pages of his exit cue--after which, it is devoutly to be hoped, he will disappear into the obscurity he so richly deserves, never to be heard from or seen again as long as he shall live.

Now we know what they really care about

As was widely reported in the news this morning, Republicans in the Senate successfully filibustered the Webb amendment, which would have guaranteed servicemembers the same amount of time at home between tours of duty as they had to spend in Iraq (or anywhere else, presumably). Less widely reported, at least on anything that I heard or saw until just now, was this disgusting tidbit:

To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.

That "meaningless" (to quote all the Republican rhetoric from the days when they were still in control and wanted to pooh-pooh anything the Democratic minority tried to put forward) sense-of-the-Senate resolution passed by a vote of 72-25. Every single Republican voted in favor, as did Republican-in-all-but-name Joe Lieberman. Worse, so did 22 more-or-less actual Democrats.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? We can't do anything to bring our troops home (despite the fact that nearly 50% of respondents in a recent CBS News poll said they weren't willing to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for more than another year and 68% of respondents called for ending the U.S. presence altogether or reducing it), or at least guarantee them equal amounts of home and away time; we can't pass a federal budget with barely a week left in the current fiscal year; we can't provide health insurance to needy children--but by God, we can criticize an ad that ran a week ago and which was, by and large, factually accurate and certainly an accurate reflection of the way an awful lot of people in this country seem to feel about the war in Iraq and those twits that are presently running it. For the love of all that's holy, even Petraeus's boss doesn't seem to think all that highly of him, having characterized him this past spring as an "ass-kissing little chickenshit" according to sources. Will the Senate be able to cram in a vote on another sense-of-the-Senate resolution deriding that remark tomorrow? Or will they be too busy protecting the Pretzelnit from deserved criticism of, well, just about anything? Inquiring minds want to know.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing

Regrettably, that's what I think Democrats' weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Iraq mess is likely to come to for the next 490 days. Not because we're in the wrong, not because we're weak, not because we can't mobilize the people behind us, and not for lack of trying to extricate ourselves from this ginormous clusterfuck that the Boy Who Would Be King seems bound and determined to do his utmost to strap on the back of whoever manages to supplant him 491 days from now.

No, I think our basic problem goes far beyond the superficialities I just mentioned. (Not, regrettably, that my saying so is likely to put an early or a permanent end to the sort of circular firing-squad that seems to break out with great regularity in Left Blogistan these days.) The problem, as I see it, with our arguments is that we are assuming our opponents are behaving rationally. They're not, and they never have been. They're behaving tactically and largely as they have been conditioned to do for decades, from a place of primal fear.

There are, indeed, all manner of perfectly reasonable, rational arguments for why we should never have gone into Iraq in the first place. There are even more perfectly rational, reasonable arguments for why, having gone there, we should now get the hell out with even more speed than we went in. (One of the biggest among them being the survey results in Anbar, the province that the Pretzelnit has now decided is going to be his benchmark du jour of success in Iraq, showing that every single respondent wants our troops the fuck out of their front yards, and three-fourths of them think we should leave right now.)

All of that means bupkes to the Republicans, who have somehow morphed Iraq into a national test of machismo such that if we leave, we'll show the world we're a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys wimps, and so pretty soon the terrrrrists we aren't fighting over there will be showing up on our lawns. A slightly different but related spin is the one the ludicrously named "Freedom's Watch" is trying to put out in its not-exactly-accurate slew of ads demanding that Congress accede to the president's intent to ram his war down the throat of the next president because otherwise the sacrifices we have already made will have been in vain.

I hate to be the one to break the news, sweeties, but there is literally nothing that your man in the White House, anybody in Congress, the entire Orcosphere, or even Superman could do that would prevent those sacrifices from being in vain. They were in vain, they will always have been in vain, and that should have been obvious to any reasonably sentient being with three or more functioning brain cells as long ago as March 2003. That it was not is a sad commentary on the way in which the media, the punditocracy, and, yes, the political parties have managed to debase our national discourse to the point that people are no longer capable of recognizing logical fallacies when they are flung nightly at their heads.

Six years on

We are six years on from the latest date in American history that will live in infamy, to borrow a phrase from a much better orator and a galactically better president than the Boy Who Would Be King could ever hope to be. And what do we have to show for it?

For the most part, bugger all, that's what.

We have not, to any significant degree, done anything to make this nation or its citizens more secure against further attacks by those who perpetrated those of six years ago. Neither have we done much of anything to detain or dispatch the chief architect of those attacks--a fact of which he took great pains to remind us recently in his latest video.

Instead, we have seen six long years of the politics of fear being exploited in the most blatant and bizarre ways, to advance a cynical agenda that benefits the rich and powerful of one political party--and pretty much screws everybody else. There is virtually nothing the Bush régime has done since 11 September 2001 that has in any way made us safer. Quite the opposite, in fact.

They have lied us into, and bullied other nations to join, an ill-advised war that served no useful purpose and responded to no credible threat to our national security or anyone else's. That war, which we were repeatedly told as this administration was lying its way into it, would be quick and cheap and easy, has turned out to be anything but--as any reasonably intelligent primate could have told any of the flacks pushing the president to get it on in the first place.

We broke off our efforts to track down and punish those who were responsible for 11 September 2001 in order to pursue this never-ending freakish sideshow in Iraq. That sideshow is now draining our treasury, wasting the lives and potential of most of a generation of young men and women, and besmirching our good name--and in consequence, our ability to achieve many far more important goals in world politics that might actually make us safer and more secure, and do far more to combat the forces of global terror.

Dona nobis pacem....quam celerrime

Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for me:

And this one was just too ironic to pass up. No wonder Abu Gonzalez and his staff did such a lousy job at the Department of Justice: nobody bothered to tell them to bone Latin. It's probably impossible to see at this resolution, but there's a minute inscription above the figures above the door in this shot. It reads Lege atque ordine omnia fiunt, "Let all things be done with law and order."

When do you suppose was the last time they hearkened to that precept?

Pardon me, but your slip is showing

I think NPR's senior news analyst Republican bootlicker Juan Williams revealed a little more than he intended to on "Morning Edition" this morning. Renee Montagne brought him in to discuss the Senate "all-nighter" last night. After kicking that football around for a while, she asked a follow-up about how being perceived as the "party of the Iraq War" might affect the Republicans' chances to hang on to some of the 21 Senate seats they have to defend next fall (about half of which, according to her, are considered to be in jeopardy).

And that's when Williams let the cat out of the bag. To listen to all those stalwart WINOs (waverers in name only--I forget where I saw that appellation today, but it's apt) in the Republican caucus speaking on the floor of the Senate last night, for the U.S. to begin even to think about pulling our troops out of harm's way in Iraq is the height of craven cowardice, a callous waste of the lives and sacrifices made by all those young men and women wearing the uniform. Fast-forward to next spring, however (at least according to Williams), and the Bush administration is already planning to pull out some troops--again quoting Williams--the better to help Republican candidates in the fall elections.

That bears repeating, so here it is again, slightly rephrased. Starting to think now about an orderly withdrawal to begin next April (the Democratic plan as laid out in the amendment the Republicans filibustered to death this morning) = bad strategy, craven cowardice, playing politics with the lives of the troops, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Already having plans to pull out some troops in March to help embattled Republican candidates' election chances (the Hedgemony's plan as stated by Juan Williams on NPR this morning) = fine and dandy.

And the Republicans have the gall to call last night's Senate debate a sham political trick? To paraphrase Iñigo Montoya, "I do not think those words mean what you think they mean." Follow me below the fold for a different kind of slip that I also heard about on NPR today.

A funny thing happened to me at the archives today...

You never know what you're going to find when you riffle through old files. Sometimes you get nothing, sometimes you get a few things, and every once in a while, you get absolutely everything you could have wanted.

Today was not one of those days. However, as I was browsing through a thousand-odd pages of correspondence from the mid-to-late 1940s on France's foreign policy vis-à-vis Germany, I stumbled across something that somebody really ought to read to the Deciderer and his policy-wonk wannabes before they go into the G8 meetings tomorrow.

It was written nearly 60 years ago by Paul Claudel, a French poet and sometime diplomat (and member of the Académie Française). It originally appeared in the July 1948 issue of the Stuttgarter Rundschau under the title "Deutschland Frankreichs Schild" ("Germany is France's Shield"). It's a long article, but here's the relevant bit:

Aber mit Kasernenhofmethoden wird man niemals ein Volk die Freiheit und die Demokratie lehren können. Nur wenn es die Freiheit lebt, wird es die Freiheit lernen.

Diese Freiheit muß gelebt sein. Man soll nicht aus dem deutschen Menschen ein soziales Atom machen, das von Zeit zu Zeit einen Zettel Papier durch den Schlitz einer Wahlurne steckt; man muß ein Bürger aus ihm machen, genau so wie wir Franzosen uns den “citoyen” denken: seiner selbst bewußt, voll Tätigkeit, voll Verantwortungsgefühl, bereit alles zu schaffen, was seine Hände schaffen können.

But you'll never be able to teach a people freedom and democracy with parade-ground methods. Only when they live freedom will they learn freedom.

This freedom must be lived. We shouldn't turn the German man into a social atom, who occasionally pushes a piece of paper through the slot of a ballot box; we should make a citizen out of him, in just the same way as we French think of a "citoyen": conscious of himself, with full ability, full sense of responsibility, and ready to create whatever his hands are capable of creating.

Just change "German" into "Iraqi" and "French" into "American," and presto, instant important message for the pretzelnit. Not that he'd ever pay any attention to it of course, though that does not for a moment diminish its appropriateness or the veracity of the opinions Claudel stated.

I second the emotion

So Pretzel-Boy is all puffing himself up and trying to look like he's still relevant, holding a veto ceremony to announce that setting a timetable for the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq as tantamount to "setting a date for failure." I hate to be the one to break it to you, Bushie, but you did that one all by your lonesome, four years ago when you decided to invade. The minute the first of our troops set foot on Iraqi soil, we had failed--thanks to you and your misadministration's inability to cope with reality or to plan for the actual situation on the ground, instead of the little World of Warquest fantasy y'all had concocted in your pointy heads.

And here's another news flash for you: The insurgents (terrorists, freedom fighters, call them what you will) in Iraq don't have to wait for our troops to leave to overthrow the Iraqi government and control the country. They're already doing both. And no, we really don't need to wait another couple of months to see if your "surge" idea is going to help any--that's already a foregone conclusion.

In the spirit of bipartisanship you seem to wish you knew how to achieve, however, I'm perfectly willing to agree to the compromise that Bryan has proposed: if you and the Shrubbery will all resign right now, we'll quite happily pass a "clean" bill through Congress to fund the Department of Defense.

Lemme 'splain. No, there is too much. Lemme sum up.

By a two-to-one margin (or nearly so), Americans think George W. Bush is doing a lousy job in Iraq. Nearly two-thirds of them say both that Bush has the wrong ideas about how to conduct the war, and think that setting a timetable for pulling out would be a good idea.

Congress, never a terribly popular institution of our government, is nevertheless polling 10 points higher in approval ratings than the pretzelnit is. Both houses of Congress have already voted to either suggest or require that if the pretzelnit wants any more money to carry on his wars, he start thinking about ways to end them fairly quickly.

Yesterday in Najaf and other cities, tens of thousands of Iraqis called for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from their country. And yet Bush expects the Democratic leadership to come to the White House next week to parlay on the supplemental war funding bill, but refuses to budge from his "Give me all the money with no strings attached or else I veto it" tantrum? What's wrong with this picture?

Look, George, I know this Constitution stuff is hard, but try to follow along, mmm-kay? Congress holds the purse strings. They not only decide how much money you get for, well, everything, they also decide just how that money gets spent. If they say you can't spend money without setting a deadline, then you can't spend money without setting a deadline.

Y'see, Congress remembers what you've long since forgotten--if in fact your Uncle Dick and Uncle Karl ever told you about it in the first place--and that's that everybody in the federal government works for the voters. We've made our position on your little war more than clear. In fact, we've been shouting it at the top of our lungs for the last four years straight. We've finally gotten Congress to pay attention, because they're mainly interested in keeping their cushy jobs and even cushier pensions, and they lose all those perks if we send them home early--just like we did to all the Republican incumbents you were counting on to keep control of Congress last year.

Now, we can't send you home in the same way, because the Constitution doesn't allow for recall elections. (And you should be thanking your lucky stars for that!) But we--through our representatives in Congress--can surely make your life even more miserable than it already is for the last two years of your pretzelnicity. So why don't you, for once in your life, suck it up and act like the big man you've always pretended to be? Invite the congressional leaders over for coffee and cookies, and let their people talk to your people about finding a reasonable compromise. You aren't going to get your money without strings, and while we're probably not going to get our one-year timetables for withdrawal, we're really not all that tied to a particular date. We'd just like to have you acknowledge the sad fact that there's no chance we're ever going to win the war--or anything else--in Iraq, and that it's long past time we at least started thinking about how and when to get the hell out of there.