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.

Terribilis est locus iste

The title of this post is from the Vulgate Latin of Genesis 28:17. Of old, it was the Introit or entrance hymn proper to the dedication of a new church in the Catholic tradition. Literally translated, it means "This is a terrible place," but "terrible" needs to be understood not in the modern sense of something awful or bad, but a place that inspired awe. I'd have said "awesome," but those connotations are not right, either--especially in view of the context in which I'm writing.

Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (of which I have the honor to be a charter member), was shot and killed this afternoon in the line of duty at the museum. An 88-year-old Maryland man, James W. von Brunn, walked into the museum carrying a rifle, pointed it at Mr. Johns, and pulled the trigger. Mr. Johns did not even have time to draw his own weapon. Mr. von Brunn, described as a "hard-core" white supremacist (is there another kind?), was wounded by other guards who returned fire. He is listed in critical condition at George Washington University Hospital.

This was heller Wahnsinn, to use the language Mr. von Brunn's ancestors probably spoke, "utter madness." Wahn is virtually an untranslatable word in German--there is no clear English cognate. "Madness," "insanity," "mania," "delusion," "craziness"--all fit, but none of them precisely.

The last time I was in Washington, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum for the first time. It was, indeed, both a terrible and an awesome place: not quite the equal, in my estimation, of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but nevertheless a hallowed place for what it commemorates and the work that goes on there. Terribilis est locus iste, indeed. The museum may not, to carry on with the text of Genesis, be literally a domus Dei et porta caeli, "the house of God and the gate of heaven," but it is certainly now a more terrible and awesome place for having the blood of a martyr spilled at its very gates.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the family of Mr. Johns. I will leave them with some words that may perhaps provide some comfort in their time of sorrow:

...all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

--John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII

Put away the tar and feathers

Left Blogistan has been all a-twitter the last few days over the possibility that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might allow a vote on a version of the telecommunications bill that contained retroactive amnesty for the telcom firms that consented to allow the Hedgemony to use them to spy on American citizens. The Pretzelnit has promised to veto any telecommunications bill presented him that does not contain this immunity provision. Many Democratic members of Congress (and even more of those members' constituents) are equally determined not to cave to the White House and establish the principle that personal communications between citizens on American soil are no longer covered by the Fourth Amendment protection against warrantless searches.

Well, Senator Reid pulled the telcom bill from consideration today, saying it was too complex a piece of legislation, and one that too many people had definite opinions on, to warrant rushing it through the legislative process. It will come back when the Senate does in January. As with any good compromise, everybody went away from the table with something to be happy about and something to gripe about. The White House and the telcom companies can hope to influence legislators during the holiday break, and will get a chance at an upperdown vote next month. The Democratic caucus (and Democrats everywhere) can also hope to influence legislators over the break, and did get the bill taken off the table. They're not happy, of course, that it isn't permanently off the table, and the White House isn't happy that it isn't permanently enshrined on the statute book.

Me, I'm happy that putting this legislation off until January means that the Senate will have time to consider the omnibus funding bill that will be heading its way sometime this week, and which absolutely needs to get passed. The government has been running on continuing resolutions since the beginning of the federal fiscal year October 1. What that means is that every branch of the federal government is basically running on the same amount of money it had last year--less a few percentage points, just in case they have to take a cut at some point in response to a congressional action. That, despite having to pay higher salaries because of cost-of-living increases and other raises that took effect at the start of the new fiscal year, higher prices for just about everything, and, of course, ever-increasing demand for federal services and programs. Until Congress passes a budget and the president signs it into law, all those lovely new appropriations we heard about in the budget bill are less than useless. They're authorized, but not appropriated, to use the proper politico-legal jargon. What matters are appropriations--that's the actual money. Authorizations carry about as much weight as one of Bush's signing statements, or that bathetically idiotic "sense of the Congress" resolution about the importance of Christmas.

It's time for TSA to put up or shut up

Just ahead of the busiest travel week of the year, the Transportation Security Terrorist Supply Administration has major egg on its face, in the wake of a report showing that screeners routinely missed potential bomb components in covert tests across the country:

In one set of tests, however, investigators were stopped for having items in a bag larger than quart-size but were allowed to proceed through a checkpoint without being forced to transfer the items to a smaller bag. At another airport, a screener stopped a tester carrying a small, unlabeled bottle of medicated shampoo, saying "it could contain acid," but did not recognize an actual liquid explosive carried separately by the tester.

In other examples, an investigator carried coins in his pockets to trigger a hand-wand and pat-down search but brought bomb components through without notice.

This is not a surprise to anyone who travels frequently. I can't count the number of times I've been standing there, shoeless, in a security line, and heard a passenger ahead of me or in an adjacent line being warned about personal care products that are in containers too large to be carried on under current regulations, or not in the stupid bags that we're supposed to use, even as I walk through the scanner with a forgotten pocketknife in my jeans, or unbagged containers of liquids (hand sanitizer, saline nasal spray, or decongestant--obviously, I'm a terrorist) in my carryon bag. Our airport security is a classic case of swallowing camels and straining at gnats.

Predictably, the GAO report that announced the findings of the tests calls for even more stringent measures. I would argue that we really ought to drop the premise that the TSA is contributing anything worthwhile to airline security and completely revamp the way we handle security screenings. The answer is not to make passengers show up naked and banning carry-on luggage altogether, though I'm sure there's a bureaucrat who's proposed something along those lines. The answer is to get serious about what we're looking for, what we need to worry about, and who is likely to carry it.

We can throw out the assumption that it is only scarybrownpeople or Muslims Islamojihadifascists that we need to worry about: not only are those assumptions racist at base, they're fundamentally stupid. Sure, al Qaeda is significantly pissed at us right now--but they're hardly the only ones. And unlike the TSA which is living proof of Newton's First Law of Motion (specifically the part about inertia), al Qaeda and other serious terrorist groups are smart enough to think ahead and recruit ordinary-looking, innocuous white people to carry their water (or whatever) onto our planes.

We don't need to worry about shoe bombs. Not only was the only person who ever attempted such a thing caught, have you ever tried bending down to do anything with your shoes in the average economy-class airline seat lately? It would be significantly easier to hold a 10-person orgy in an airplane lavatory. U.S. airports are, to the best of my knowledge and in my experience, the only ones in the world where passengers are required to take their shoes off to go through security. (And I can't believe the number of people I see going through without socks on, standing barefoot on floors that God knows who has tracked up with God knows what kind of nasty gunk.) Yet, strangely in the TSA's view, I feel safer flying out of Charles de Gaulle in Paris, or Ben Gurion in Tel Aviv. I may not have to take off my shoes in either of those latter airports, but I'll damn sure get more than a cursory look from the security personnel, and they will actually look at (and sometimes into) my luggage. Repeatedly. It may not be as geek-cool as some of the high-tech scanners TSA is apparently wanting to deploy, which would allow them to virtually strip passengers passing through security checkpoints, but unlike the high-tech toys, the security measures in Paris and Tel Aviv actually appear to work.

Neither, unless I'm flying back to the United States, do I have to limit the size of the liquid containers I bring on board with me, or put them in a plastic bag. (Really, what the hell does that do to facilitate the screening process?) In my more cynical moments, I'm inclined to suspect that TSA uses such measures more as a public-relations campaign to lull travelers into a false sense of security.

And that, I suspect, is the crux of the matter right there. TSA seems to be far more interested in appearing to be effective than in actually being effective. And that's not acceptable. I'm willing to put up with a few inconveniences in return for a reasonable expectation that I will not be injured or killed in a terrorist action when I board a plane to go on a vacation or business trip. But there are limits to what I'm willing to put up with without griping--and I have absolutely no patience for purely cosmetic measures. Given that, on a good day, TSA screenings appear to be good for little more than providing the illusion of security, I'm growing less and less willing to continue putting up with them.

No wonder they can't catch terrorists

Apparently they're too busy looking for reading tips:

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

The book thing is what seems to have been getting the most attention around the blogosphere, but I think the rest of the article is far more important. For one thing, having been through quite a few airports (and a couple of customs barriers) in the past year, I frankly doubt that federal agents have either the time or the resources to paw through people's luggage on any kind of a regular basis. Unless they're actually riffling through checked baggage before they allow it to be loaded, they'd have no way of knowing what books most travelers are carrying, as books are transparent to X-rays. (I know: I've carried quite a few of them through quite a few TSA checkpoints.)

Plus, air travel reached record levels this summer, rebounding after several years of decreased volume in the aftermath of the Day That Changed Everything^TM. Airlines, airports, and the TSA itself, on the other hand, either seem not to have noticed the ever-growing flood of people pouring in to avail themselves of their services, or really don't care anymore--because staffing levels have either declined or, at best, remained steady. It already takes a good 25-30 minutes, in my experience, to make it through the security lines at most airports. Taking the time to riffle through everyone's carry-on luggage to look at what sorts of "subversive" materials they might be carrying would effectively double or triple that wait time--and probably quintuple the number of complaints received about the holdups.

It's no skin off my nose if TSA want to see what I'm reading. Chances are good that they wouldn't even understand the titles of a lot of what I carry through airports, since it tends to be academic tomes--and often in foreign languages. I draw the line, however, at suggesting that what someone reads is any real indication of his or her inclination toward terrorism or the overthrow of the U.S. government.

For example, I know a member of our faculty who researches the effects of psychotropic drugs. In his hands, a "book on marijuana," such as the one referenced in the WaPo story linked to above, might mean nothing more than the routine conduct of his academic research. In the same way, I regularly buy, check out of libraries, and carry around with me, books on ethnic cleansing, genocide, fascism, Nazism, and authoritarianism: because I'm an historian, and these are some of the things I study in depth. Doesn't mean I'm planning to emulate anything that I read about.

In fact, when you get right down to it, nobody in her right mind would ever expect such a data-collection enterprise to turn up a real terrorist, unless the terrorist in question were truly stupid--and those are the ones we don't have to worry about. The ones we want the TSA and Homeland Security to catch are the smart ones, the ones that actually have a chance of carrying out their plans. But they are too smart to be caught walking through an airport security check, or crossing an international border, with anything that might potentially reveal their intentions. It would be wonderful if all terrorists were required by some obscure bylaw to carry with them at all times a copy of Terrorism for Dummies (conveniently in English, of course, the better to catch the attention of our sniveling servants who can barely manage to be coherent in one language, let alone two or three)--but that will never happen.

Meanwhile, as they attempt to keep track of People Who Might Cause Them Trouble, our government is quite likely to be missing the people they really ought to be watching. And of course, in order to piece together just who might be likely to give them trouble, the government has to collect far more data than it would like for us to know about, to keep it for far longer than they've promised they would, and to look at it and manipulate it in ways they promised they wouldn't. This should surprise no one--and outrage everyone.

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?

Mr. Pot is paging Mr. Kettle...

So according to America's Mayor that vaguely pro-choice, pro-gay rights, anti-gun Republican former mayor of a major metropolitan area, electing a Democratic president in 2008 will inevitably lead to another September 11:

"If any Republican is elected president — and I think obviously I would be the best at this — we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it," Giuliani said.

The former New York City mayor, currently leading in all national polls for the Republican nomination for president, said Tuesday night that America would ultimately defeat terrorism no matter which party gains the White House.

"But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have?" Giuliani said. "If we are on defense [with a Democratic president], we will have more losses and it will go on longer."

"I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," Giuliani continued. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense."

He added: "The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us."

Democrats understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us just fine, Rudy. In fact, I think history and recent experience have more than amply demonstrated that it is in fact the Republicans who simply don't get it. And you're hardly in the best position to lead on that issue, all your propaganda notwithstanding.

Follow me below the fold for the reasons why the BS detector pictured above just blew every safety circuit it had.