Putting America's "Wars of Choice" in Perspective

America, land of the formerly free and home of the lamentably broke.

A recent Harvard study estimated the costs of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at at least $4-trillion and likely closer to $6-trillion.

That's six trillion taxpayer dollars, a mountain of money that has been essentially borrowed which makes it an ever-growing mountain of debt.

In an era in which politicians find it advantageous to insulate the voting public from the true costs of their leaders' adventures, amounts like this are almost impossible to grasp.   It's understandable that America's pols prefer that the public not know that they're now on the hook, per household, to the tune of $75,000 for the two wars, the pair, the set.   A "brace" of wars?

Seventy-five grand, seventy-five large per household.   Now there's a figure you can almost wrestle with.

''There will be no peace dividend'', is the stark conclusion from the 22-page report from the Kennedy School of Government, ''and the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan wars will be costs that persist for decades''.

"There's a sense that we are turning the corner but, unfortunately, the legacy of these wars, because of decision about the way we fought and funded these wars, means we will be paying the costs for a long time to come,'' Professor Bilmes said. ''We may be mentally turning the page but we are certainly not from a budgetary and financial perspective.''
''More than half of the 1.56 million troops who have been discharged to date have received medical treatment … and been granted benefits for the rest of their lives,'' the report said. It also said the real bills would not fall due for decades to come.

The second major hidden cost of the two conflicts would be servicing the debts incurred as a result of the ''unprecedented'' decision to pay for the wars entirely from debt while cutting taxes during wartime.

And that is the legacy the Republicans bequeathed to the United States.   It was Bush/Cheney who enacted not one, but two major tax cuts for the rich while waging two expensive, protracted and hopeless wars on borrowed money as their nation became increasingly mired in debt and deficits.   That was the true face of oligarchy revealed - only the American people couldn't see it staring straight into their faces.

And now, having done this to their own people, they're going to rape them again by cutting their medicaid, medicare, Social Security, even food stamps to pay for their largesse to the richest of the rich.   Isn't it time to storm the Bastille?
 

And How Did That Work Out For You?

It's settled now that Iraq's oil riches pretty much sealed Saddam Hussein's fate.   The Anglo-American conquest of Iraq was heavily an oil-driven decision.   And wasn't it nice of the Americans to avoid bombing Iraq's oil infrastructure and to make it the first of the few things they actually secured after they toppled Saddam?

And now, a decade later, Iraq is on the verge of becoming the world's second-largest oil producer.  Oh boy, all those years of war and suffering are finally paying off.    Sure, that is if you're China.

America, with its own homegrown energy bonanza, isn’t going after the petroleum that lies beneath Iraq’s sands nearly as aggressively as is China, a country hungry to fuel its rise as an economic power.

Iraq remains highly unstable in terms of security, infrastructure and politics. Chinese state-owned oil companies appear more willing to put up with that than Americans are.

“The Chinese have a higher tolerance for risk,” said Gal Luft, a co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington research center focused on energy.

The International Energy Agency expects China to become the main customer for Iraq’s vast oil reserves. Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist, recently declared “a new trade axis is being formed between Baghdad and Beijing.” Birol said that about 80 percent of Iraq’s future oil exports were expected to go to Asia, mainly to China.

Isn't America generous?  It spent trillions of dollars to make Iran the dominant power in the region and to allow China to stitch up Iraq's oil reserves (hint, Beijing is doing the same with Iran's oil).

All the King's Horses and All the King's Men....

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/27/187100/iraqi-oil-once-seen-as-us-boon.html#storylink=omni_popular#storylink=cpy

The U.S. Legacy from Iraq and Afghanistan - Only a Nuclear Attack Could be Worse

The costs and political fallout from America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are and will continue to be enormous, somewhere between 4 and 6-trillion dollars.   That could be almost as damaging to American security than if the U.S. suffered a nuclear attack.

Money, ultimately, is power. In context, it would take a nuclear strike on the United States to inflict the kind of economic damage that the wars have reaped. The only nations capable of inflicting such damage are disinclined toward doing so; and no non-state actor will plausibly obtain the capability to match such a threat. All of that damage is the result not of what bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or the insurgencies that began in their wake did to America, but because of how American strategiests chose to respond. As Radiohead once sang, you do it to yourself, and that’s why it really hurts. 

Linda J. Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School estimates that the wars bin Laden provoked the U.S. into launching over the past decade have cost “somewhere between $4 and $6 trillion.” She reaches that staggeringly high total by calculating not just what the U.S. spent on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also what it will spend on veterans’ health care and benefits; equipment refurbishment; future commitments made to the Iraqi and Afghan governments the U.S. sponsors; and the repayment of the debt incurred by financing the wars through foreign borrowing. Notably, by Bilmes’ framework, the real costs of the wars will only manifest long after the troops have come home.

She’s also under-counting. The shadow wars in Yemen, Pakistan, east Africa and north-central Africa will not cost nearly as much as the Army-intensive wars of Iraq or Afghanistan. But they’ll still cost something, either through leased infrastructure to base aircraft and special-operations forces; political commitments to host governments; support to allied war efforts; and some personnel costs. All these wars have the same wellspring as Iraq and Afghanistan: U.S. overreaction to terrorism.


“One of the most significant challenges to future US national security policy will not originate from any external threat,” Bilmes writes. “Rather it is simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan”.

In the run-up to the invasion and conquest of Iraq, Rumsfeld's minions estimated (and budgeted) for a total cost of between $60- to 95-billion.

When America Became Amerika

The media is swamped with articles about the 10th anniversary of the Anglo-American conquest of Iraq.   To those of us in the "I Told You So" camp, most of these missives are utter crap.   That's probably because they're being written or published by those who showed their true colours in the run-up to the war, the Bush-Cheney-Blair cheerleaders who would rather everyone forgot about their own behaviour in 2003.

Fortunately The Atlantic has an article that rips the scab off the "Hatred, Resentment and Mockery" that mainstream Amerika lavished on those who dared stand against the war.

Reflecting on the apologetic Iraq War retrospectives many writers have published in recent days, Freddie deBoer observes that "one of the most obvious and salient aspects of the run up to the war" is being ignored: "the incredible power of personal resentment against antiwar people, or what antiwar people were perceived to be." As he remembers it, "the visceral hatred of those opposing the war, and particularly the activists, was impossible to miss. It wasn't opposition. It wasn't disagreement. It was pure, irrational hatred, frequently devolving into accusations of antiwar activists being effectively part of the enemy." Now, he says, it is all but forgotten.

The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf has researched a sampling of the irrational hatred that was spewed at Iraq war opponents, just a sampling, and it's disturbing.  Follow the link above and read the article in its entirety.

Doves are held up to ridicule, their patriotism disparaged, their allegiances questioned, their aesthetics mocked, and their position attacked from every rationally irrelevant angle imaginable. Humans do it again and again, even though it always seems discrediting in hindsight. Says deBoer, "I think people don't want to admit that hatred of the left-wing was part of their problem in 2002 and 2003 because they still hate the left, and recognizing the irrationality of their earlier hatred would compel them to think over their current hatred." He is right.

The Muddled Mind of Lord Prescott

Back when he was Tony Blair's deputy prime minister he was for it but now Lord/Baron John Prescott says the Anglo-American war on Iraq "can't be justified."

Prescott says he supported the conquest of Iraq back in 2003 because he'd been told that George w. Bush would sort out the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

Speaking on BBC One’s This Week, however, he said he “can't just disown it” but now thought the war was wrong.

“I go through my thoughts trying to justify it,” he said. “It cannot be justified as an intervention.”

He had been persuaded of the wisdom of the intervention because, he said, Mr Bush “was quite prepared to have a plan for Israel and the whole problem in regard to Palestine and he promised.”

But the plan "fell apart as it often does in American politics because the influence domestically is too great", he added.

Prescott's former boss, Tony Blair, has spent the week moaning that people are still "very abusive" of him for dragging Britain into America's Iraq adventure and he's given up trying to persuade them (i.e. everybody but himself and Dick Cheney) that it was the right decision.

How Dick Cheney Buried the Truth of His Iraq War

Dick Cheney has buried the truth of America's conquest of Iraq so deep that he will himself be long dead and buried before the facts are ever exhumed.

It might have something to do with the annoying fact that the invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression waged on the flimsiest of pretences and, hence, the sort of war crime for which people have danced at the end of a rope.   People with that sort of problem like to keep the details quiet.

Cheney's office, according to  [William Leonard, former director of the Information Security Oversight Office] took secrecy to excessive lengths -- attempting to classify as much as possible, and often bypassing the system altogether by inventing classification markings. Even documents as ordinary as Cheney's talking points were marked Treated as Top Secret/SCI or Treated as Top Secret/Codeword.

"That's not a recognized marking," said Leonard. "I have no idea if it was the intent, but I can guarantee you what the consequences of those markings are. When any of this material eventually does end up at a presidential library and access demands are being made, or it's being processed for release, when some poor archivist sees material marked Handle as SCI, it's going into the bottom of the pile, and it is going to get much more conservative review. Whether it was the intent to retard the eventual release of the information, I know that's going to be a consequence of it."

In one instance, the marking appeared on notes from a 2003 meeting of Cheney and his staff. They were discussing Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat, who had just written an editorial in the New York Times. In the piece, Wilson argued that there was no evidence that Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. That same year, Cheney's office stopped filing annual reports on its classification activities. When the ISOO moved to inspect his office -- as it was authorized and compelled to do by executive order -- Cheney's people argued that because the Office of the Vice President has duties with both the executive and legislative branches, the executive order on classified material doesn't apply. (The White House counsel, unsurprisingly, concurred.)

As Leonard told us, "Putting aside the constitutional position of the vice president, the very concept that non-elected government officials working in the White House, accessing the most highly sensitive information, and weren't obligated to follow the rules set forth by the president, I found chilling, to tell you the truth."

America's Iraq Mini- My Lai Massacre Erupts

A Wikileaks firebomb.    This time it's a U.S. diplomatic cable indicating that, in 2006, American soldiers entered a house in the Iraqi village of Ishaqi, near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, and killed everyone inside.   Ten civilians died, ranging from a 70-year old woman  to a 5-month old child.

Of the ten killed, four were women and five were children all under the age of 5. 

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head.

The McClatchey Newspapers account indicates that American authorities did not respond to requests for information at the time and they're not talking now either.

The cable closely tracks what neighbors told reporters for Knight Ridder at the time. (McClatchy purchased Knight Ridder in spring 2006.) Those neighbors said the U.S. troops had approached the house at 2:30 a.m. and a firefight ensued. In addition to exchanging gunfire with someone in the house, the American troops were supported by helicopter gunships, which fired on the house.

The cable also backs the original report from the Joint Coordination Center, which said U.S. forces entered the house while it was still standing. That first report noted: "The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men. Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals."

"An Extraordinarily Dangerous Place" - Iraq on Eve of American Pullout

Washington's Iraq Special Inspector General for Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, has taken the measure of Iraq today and laments the deterioration of security in the country.

"Iraq remains an extraordinarily dangerous place to work. It is less safe, in my judgment, than 12 months ago."

The report cited the deaths of 15 US soldiers in June - the bloodiest month for the American military in two years - but also said more Iraqi officials had been assassinated in the past few months than in any other recent period.

Bowen says the current wave of unrest seems to be the work of Shia militias.  The Shia seem to be nipping at the heels of American forces, presumably to reignite  American popular dissatisfaction with the Iraq war.

It was recently reported in The Guardian that the most influential player in Iraq today is an Iranian general, Qassem Suleimani.   The general heads Iran's elite al-Quds Force.

In Baghdad, no other name invokes the same sort of reaction among the nation's power base – discomfort, uncertainty and fear.

"He is the most powerful man in Iraq without question," Iraq's former national security minister, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told the newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat in July 2010. "Nothing gets done without him."

So, with Iraq nominally under the influence of a shadowy Iranian general, whose own elite force is said to employ Iraqi Shia militia as surrogates, the step up in attacks on American soldiers in Iraq is hardly surprising.


It is said that Suleimani basically strongarmed Iranian legislators into accepting Maliki's second term in office.   Is it any wonder now that Maliki vacillates over Washington's offer/request to keep 10,000 US soldiers in Iraq after the December 31 deadline for their withdrawal?

We can probably expect to see a significant increase in violence bordering on an actual uprising in Iraq over the next five months while the issue of should the Americans go or stay is decided.   Iran bridles at the American military presence on its borders with Iraq and Afghanistan and it's hard to imagine Baghdad defying Tehran.  The US may be left no choice but to pack up their bags and get out in time for Christmas.

Hans Blix on Iraq War: "I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war"

Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix pulled no punches in his appearance before the independent panel examining Britain's part in the Iraq war.   As far as he's concerned it was an illegal war.

"Some people maintain that Iraq was legal. I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war.  There can be cases where it is doubtful, maybe it was permissible to go to war, but Iraq was, in my view, not one of those."

From the Global Security Newswire:

"I think the U.S. at the time was high on military," Blix, a former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said at today's hearing. "They felt that they could get away with it (an invasion), and therefore it was decided they would do so."



Blix said today that U.N. inspectors checked 500 facilities but found very little proof of illicit weapons efforts in Iraq in the months before March 2003, the BBC reported. He cited missiles with ranges beyond what was allowed by the United Nations, missile engines and records among the discoveries.


"We carried out about six inspections per day over a long period of time," Blix said."All in all, we carried out about 700 inspections at different 500 sites and, in no case, did we find any weapons of mass destruction."


He added that it was difficult for Iraq "to declare any weapons when they did not have any."


Blix argued that U.N. resolutions issued before the invasion did not create a legal standing for the war.

McCain's Slave Army

John McCain's grasp of history and current events is pretty wobbly but his vision for the near future must be giving nightmares to America's hostage soldiers.

The Bush regime still maintains the tyrannical "stop loss" cudgel to force its soldiers, regulars and reservists, to keep on serving - and fighting and dying - for years beyond their intended commitment.

There are now American service personnel on their third, sometimes even fourth tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, many essentially held against their will. The reservists, in particular, have found themselves trapped with desperate families and ruined businesses or careers awaiting their eventual return home.

Here's the brutal truth. John McCain intends to keep these people fighting for the foreseeable future or until America wins the already lost Afghan and Iraq wars. He intends to keep these people hostage because the only other way he can continue "to victory" is to draft replacements.

The giveaway is found in McCain's recent speech where he outlined his vision for bringing American troops home after winning Iraq and Afghanistan by 2013. This is what he said,

"By January, 2013 America is welcome [sic] home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom."

By 2013 some of these indentured troops will have served in combat longer than any Western soldiers for centuries.

Years ago I read some post-WWII American studies of just how long the average soldier can function in combat. The results were quite interesting. Long before the body goes, the mind fails. Often the soldier either becomes unusable or deeply disturbed. There are already plenty of reports of psychological damage being sustained by American troops due to extended tours. What will four more years of fighting bring to these who have already "sacrificed terribly?"

There's not even a slight chance that McCain would ever get congressional approval for a draft. That means, as Rumsfeld said, "you go to war with the army you have." McCain's war is going to have to be fought, on and on, by the very same army that Rumsfeld had back in 2003 when he launched the adventure in the Iraqi sandbox.

I wonder if John McCain's memory is good enough to recall what happened the last time the American army became hopelessly demoralized?

Bush - Iraq War an Undeniable Success

What else was he going to say? The truth? C'mon we're talking George Walker Bush here, the hellspawn of George Herbert Walker Bush and his darling Babs.

It's the glorious fifth anniversary of the George Bush Memorial Clusterf__k more commonly known to academics as the Iraq war. Five years, doesn't time just fly?

So they popped George in some clean undies, a shirt and tie and stood him up before a crowd at the Pentagon to crow "Mission Accomplished All Over Again." From McClatchey Newspapers:

President Bush on Wednesday declared that "the successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable" [provided you're well and truly in denial] as he gave a rousing defense of the war on its fifth anniversary before a receptive but not overwhelmingly enthusiastic Pentagon audience.

As the war entered its sixth year, Bush refused to concede any setbacks in the conflict, where nearly 4,000 Americans have been killed and the country has been plunged into sectarian violence. About 158,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq.

Bush said, "my administration understood that America could not retreat in the face of terror. And we knew that if we did not act, the violence that had been consuming Iraq would worsen and spread and could eventually reach genocidal levels."

The 2007 American troop buildup "opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror," the president maintained.

He then looked ahead, saying that the goal is to "consolidate the gains we have made and seal the extremists' defeat."

Oh yeah, speaking about undeniable success. Yesterday marked the opening of reconciliation talks in Baghdad. I guess there were a lot of empty chairs. The Americans showed, so did Maliki's representatives. Sadly missing, however, were the Baathists, the Shiite militias and the Sunni insurgency. They chose to give it a pass.

Oh yeah, the other good news. The War Without End on Terror has been going so gosh-darn well that the top White House counterterrorism post was left to sit empty for the past 15-months! I guess George must have picked up on that when one of his aides glanced through the latest Newsweek. That got George going and, today, he announced the appointment of Ken Wainstein to be his new White House-based homeland security adviser.

If You Can't Beat'em, Bleed'em Dry

Napoleon's soldiers marched on their bellies. George Bush's soldiers march on America's frayed financial future.

America's trained chimp, George w. Bush, assured his people that he didn't need 300,000 soldiers to conquer Iraq and fired his top military man, General Shinseki. He assured his people the whole thing would cost $50-billion, $60-billion tops and fired his first economic advisor, Lawrence B. Lindsey who had the audacity to claim the war would cost $100-billion to $200-billion annually.

Then there was Cheney who promised that American troops would be greeted as liberators and Rumsfeld who said the whole thing would take six weeks, six months at the outside.

America has the mightiest military machine on the planet, perfect at rolling up a battered and disabled Iraqi army in 2003, and utterly useless at controlling the country ever since. There is simply nothing quite so pathetic looking as a main battle tank without another tank to shoot.

The conquest of Iraq was supposed to be an object lesson to little, unfriendly nations around the world of what happens when America plays hardball. They watched and learned but the lesson played out wasn't the one America wanted to send.

Mainstreet America may believe that the "surge" is working and it is until you factor in the dormant Shiite militias and Sunni resistance. They've taken a break from slaughtering each other and passing American troops but they're still there and they're still ready to go and there's no reason to think they won't be heard from again - soon.

The success of the surge has been measured in body counts, a bit of foolishness that America hasn't been able to shake since Viet Nam. If you want to measure the surge you need to look at other signs - the lack of electricity, water, sanitation, even gasoline; the lack of meaningful political progress; the corruption of the Iraqi government and the infiltration of its security services. If you leave the body counts out of it, this surge has accomplished precisely nothing.

Another object lesson from the Iraq war is how astonishingly ineffecient and profligate America is at this sort of thing. It's now spending roughly $12-billion each month on direct operational costs alone for its war. That's money it doesn't have. That's money it has to borrow - on foreign markets, money that will be bequeathed in the form of interest-bearing debt to America's youth and their children.

What happens if Asia and Europe decide they're not interested in funding America's wars any longer? Better yet, what happens if they decide they will keep lending money but they want the IOUs in Euros, not American greenbacks?

When you fight an unwinnable, war without end, entirely on borrowed money that you squander like a manic-depressive on crack, you're playing a mug's game. It's something only a trained chimp would consider worthwhile. Happy legacy, President Numbnuts.

Cheney to the American People - "Go F__k Yourselves"

He was born a Dick, he's been a dick his whole life and a dick he remains. On the 5th anniversary of the Great American Fiasco, aka the Iraq War, Dick Cheney sat down for an interview and made clear just what he thinks of his "fellow Americans." From the New York Times:

Martha Raddatz, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, sat down with Mr. Cheney in Amman, Jordan, one of several stops on a Middle East tour that includes Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Oman, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

After Ms. Raddatz asked about the economy — which he said was in “a rough patch,” not a recession — the subject turned to the deep unpopularity of the Iraq war. Here’s a transcript of the exchange, released by the network:

Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

Cheney: So?

Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

Cheney: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. There has, in fact, been fundamental change and transformation and improvement for the better. That’s a huge accomplishment.

You know, he might be right. Under Saddam, after all, the Iraqi people had to endure functioning hospitals and electricity and they didn't even have any sewage flowing down the streets in front of their homes. There has been fundamental change.