Being an 'indispensable nation' is killing America

This op-ed is worth re-posting in full.

Never let it be said I'm a partisan hack: I support Borosage's indictment of President Obama's executive overreach in conducting military operations without Congressional approval for war. 

More damning to my mind has been President Obama's failure to articulate to the nation (and Congress) a national security-military doctrine/vision (call it what you will) that makes it clear when he thinks the United States should send its troops into battle, and when we shouldn't. Granted, this may be the most difficult job of any POTUS in an ever-changing world, and with inherited conflicts of past presidents.

Is it because Obama and his team doesn't have the strategic capacity to develop such a vision? Is it because Obaama is too arrogant to articulate it for us, we're just supposed to trust him not to do "stupid shit"? Or, most likely, is it because a timid Obama fears that no matter what he says, it will be parsed and pilloried by Republicans -- who also can't agree among themselves on a foreign policy -- looking to score partisan political points?

Borosage is right to point out that the opportunity cost of U.S. military adventures abroad is investment in piss-poor education and crumbling infrastructure at home. Maybe our government can buy guns and butter... but not forever, not at a sustainable cost. This is where the "fiscally responsible" yet "pro-military" Tea Parties and Republicans have fallen on their faces as an opposition, by refusing to specify just what they are willing to give up to achieve their stated top priority of fiscal balance.

Being the ‘indispensable nation’ is killing American democracy

By Robert L. Borosage

October 20, 2014 | Reuters

America — proudly dubbed the “indispensable nation” by its national-security managers — is now the entangled nation enmeshed in conflicts across the globe.

President Barack Obama, scorned by his Republican critics as an “isolationist” who wants to “withdraw from the world,” is waging the longest war in U.S. history in Afghanistan, boasts of toppling the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya, launches airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State and picks targets for drones to attack in as many as eight countries, while dispatching planes to the Russian border in reaction to its machinations in Ukraine, and a fleet to the South China Sea as the conflict over control of islands and waters escalates between China and its neighbors.

The indispensable nation is permanently engaged across the globe. But endless war undermines the Constitution. Democracy requires openness; war justifies secrecy. Democracy forces attention be paid to the common welfare; war demands attention and resources be spent on distant conflicts. Democracy involves forging coalitions to get action in the Congress; war is waged on executive order. The Constitution restrains the executive in times of peace; constitutional strictures are trampled in times of war.

When the founders wrote the Constitution, they worried about the tendency of kings, or presidents, to make war for personal aggrandizement or national glory.  So they gave Congress the power to declare war, intent on “clogging, not facilitating” the rush to war.  For the Republic, peace would be the normal state of affairs. War was a disruption — entered into only with prior debate and consideration by  Congress, the elected body whose members best reflected the attitudes of their constituents.

The United States, in the words of conservative John Quincy Adams, would provide a shining example of liberty as long as “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

But now the pursuit of monsters to destroy is unrelenting. Almost inevitably, it seems, the restraints of the Constitution are being trampled. With little debate, U.S. leaders have chosen permanent global intervention even at the cost of undermining the Republic.

For the cost of war can be measured in dollars not spent here at home.

An educated citizenry is the foundation of a robust democracy. Yet from the absence of free, full-day pre-K to affordable colleges to advanced training, the United States is skimping on investment in educating its citizens. A modern infrastructure is also essential to a competitive, high-wage economy. But while Washington spends $3 trillion on Iraq, there hasn’t been a serious discussion about bringing America’s aged infrastructure, including our roads, bridges and airports, up to standard — which would cost about the same. 

A bridge to somewhere... now a bridge to nowhere.

Instead of this funding, the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies spend more on their militaries than the rest of the world combined. Washington maintains more than 1,000 bases, called “military sites,” across the globe, plus 11 aircraft-carrier task forces that are essentially moveable bases. U.S. conventional and nuclear forces are unrivaled — yet Washington plans to spend another trillion dollars over the next 30 years modernizing nuclear weapons that the United States aims never to use. U.S. intelligence and covert forces are permanently engaged, often secretly creating the implicit commitments that will force the next intervention.

It is only America, as the president said in a speech announcing his intention to “degrade and ultimately defeat” Islamic State, which he refers to as ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, that “has the capacity and the will to mobilize the world against terrorism … against Russian aggression … to contain … Ebola and more.”

This president, more than his predecessors, understands the perils of being the “indispensable nation.” Elected in large part to get the United States out of the seemingly endless wars in the Middle East, he now finds himself forced into another open-ended commitment.

In his speech to the National Defense University in 2013, Obama argued, “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’ ” Obama warned specifically about this. “The choice we make about war,” the president said, “can impact —  in sometimes unintended ways — the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends.”

Yet even with this awareness, and no reelection race facing him, Obama could not escape the imperatives of America’s role as the indispensable nation. The commitments are too many,  the engagement too permanent, the capacity unrivalled — seemingly making all things possible.  As a result, this former professor of constitutional law has governed over the greatest assertion of executive authority — claiming the power to make war, to surveil, arrest, detain and even kill Americans without prior judicial review or due process.

Ike warned us about the growing "military-industrial complex" that sought to feed itself at the federal trough.

His Justice Department has used espionage laws against reporters and whistleblowers.  The secrecy shields massive waste, fraud and abuse, as the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against consumes the bulk of the national budget, aside from payments on the national debt and the insurance programs of Social Security and Medicare.

When President George W. Bush was about to launch the war in Iraq, millions of Americans – as well as many people around the globe — marched in protest. The large demonstrations against war led the New York Times to dub world public opinion a second superpower. Bush sought authority from Congress and a dramatic congressional debate took place, with strong dissent against the war.

When Obama committed the United States to the fight against Islamic State, he claimed the authority to act without Congress, though adding he would “welcome” congressional support. Yet with the midterm elections then a few months away, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress chose to postpone the debate and the vote.

The bombing began on presidential order. Americans accepted their role as spectators, registering no significant objection to this presidential war-making.  The indispensable nation is not only spending lives and resources on endless wars abroad, it is shredding its Constitution at home.

Ironically, America’s democracy is still strong enough to render it less than competent as a global policeman. Our military is the finest in the world, but still finds it hard to win a war. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that while presidents can commit the nation virtually anywhere, Americans sour on long, costly interventions on the other side of the world.

This leads to strategies like “no boots on the ground” — designed not to rouse public opposition but almost certain to fail. Polls show that Americans have no interest in policing the globe. If the Constitution no longer constrains the president from making war, the public still limits his ability to wage it.

Big Lib Idea of the Day: Free public higher education

About $40 billion. That's how much it would cost per year to pay for all students' education at public universities.  

This will never happen, sadly, because of the Tea Party mentality that is present in many Democrats' minds, too, that for some reason we have to approach every policy problem with a complicated cocktail of tax credits, loans, exceptions, opt-outs and incentives instead of government simply paying for it, at a lower cost, with less anxiety and uncertainty for qualifying students and their parents.

Meanwhile, our conservative brethren don't make a peep or give a second thought about the $1.5 trillion cost so far (or at least $4 trillion in the long-term) for Dubya's unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  $4 trillion is enough to pay for college for everybody for about 100 years, and somehow we found that money.  

Priorities, folks.  Priorities!  Jobs, health, education, housing.  (These all happen to be winning issues for Democrats, but hey, that's just incidental.)

Here's Exactly How Much the Government Would Have to Spend to Make Public College Tuition-Free

By Jordan Weissmann

January 3, 2014 | The Atlantic

A mere $62.6 billion dollars!

According to new Department of Education data, that's how much tuition public colleges collected from undergraduates in 2012 across the entire United States. And I'm not being facetious with the word mere, either. The New America Foundation says that the federal government spent a whole $69 billion in 2013 on its hodgepodge of financial aid programs, such as Pell Grants for low-income students, tax breaks, work study funding. And that doesn't even include loans. 

 

If we were we scrapping our current system and starting from scratch, Washington could make public college tuition free with the money it sets aside its scattershot attempts to make college affordable today.

Of course, we're not going to start from scratch (and I'm not even sure we should want to make state schools totally free). But I like to make this point every so often because I think it underscores what a confused mess higher education finance is in this country. On the whole, Americans seem to want affordable colleges that are accessible to all. But rather than simply using our resources to maintain a cheap public system (and remember, public schools educate 75 percent of undergrads), we spill them into a fairly wasteful and expensive private sector. At one point, a Senate investigation found that the for-profit sector alone was chowing down on 25 percent of all federal aid dollars. 

If that story sounds awfully similar the problems the U.S. faces with healthcare costs, well, that's because it is similar. Americans have an allergy to straightforward policy solutions involving the public sector. And for that, we pay a price.

Update—Friday Jan. 3, 3:45 PM: Just to clarify, because some readers have asked, making tuition free in 2012 would have required $62.6 billion on top of what state and local governments already spend subsidizing public colleges, as well as some of the federal spending that doesn't go towards financial aid. Again, you can find a detailed breakdown of how our colleges are funded in the Department of Education's data. 

For anybody interested in reading more about the idea of making public college tuition free, and the vast array of economic considerations that would entail, here's a lengthy piece I wrote last year.

Update—Friday Jan. 3, 4:31 PM: One more update to answer another good question I've received. Technically, you could say the additional cost of making college tuition free would be even cheaper than $62.6 billion. How come? Because most Pell Grant money is already spent at public colleges. In 2011 - 2012, state school students received $21.8 billion in grants. So, if you subtract that from the total needed to completely eliminate tuition, it the sum would be closer to $40 billion. (Apologies for not teasing that point out earlier. I'd noted it in a previous article and didn't think to repeat it.)

Study: Millionaires ARE different

Shocker: millionaires care the more about capital gains taxes and the federal deficit than they do about jobs and a living wage for their fellow Americans. Well knock me over with a feather.

New Study Finds the Wealthy Are Different

By Joshua Holland

March 11, 2013 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/new-study-finds-wealthy-are-different-us

Iraq cost $2 trillion so far, $6 trillion, total

Yet more proof, by their years of silence, that Tea Partyers don't care about useless spending and deficits, they just can't stand poor Americans. That's the very definition of "class warfare."

Iraq war costs U.S. more than $2 trillion: study

By Daniel Trotta

March 14, 2013 | Reuters

URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314

Texas puts education first

Yep, America (especially Texas) certainly has its priorities in order.  ... Criminy!

Dallas-area high school unveils Texas-size $60 million football stadium that seats 18,000

By Brian Browdie

August 25, 2012 | New York Daily News

URL: http://m.nydailynews.com/1.1144442#bmb=1

Frank and Ron Paul: Cut Pentagon by $1 trillion

Why haven't the Tea Parties picked up Ron Paul's banner? He was teabagging before it was hip and cool. Is it their ignorance? Are they afraid of accusations they don't "support our troops?" Or is that they're not against Big Government, per se, just against a government that spends on butter instead of guns?

Whatever the reason, the teabaggers can't be taken seriously on fiscal responsibility until they face the issues of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the hundreds of U.S. military garrisons circling the globe. Moreover, their intentions will be suspect until they start crying just as loudly to cut defense spending as they do to cut spending on health care, unemployment benefits, alternative energies, and other federal stimulus measures. In other words, until they stop acting exactly like Republicans.

For more on the Frank-Paul "odd couple" and just how badly we need to cut military spending check out NPR's interview with Barney Frank yesterday.

Why We Must Reduce Military Spending

By Rep. Barney Frank and Rep. Ron Paul

July 6, 2010 | Huffington Post

As members of opposing political parties, we disagree on a number of important issues. But we must not allow honest disagreement over some issues to interfere with our ability to work together when we do agree.

By far the single most important of these is our current initiative to include substantial reductions in the projected level of American military spending as part of future deficit reduction efforts. For decades, the subject of military expenditures has been glaringly absent from public debate. Yet the Pentagon budget for 2010 is $693 billion -- more than all other discretionary spending programs combined. Even subtracting the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military spending still amounts to over 42% of total spending.

It is irrefutably clear to us that if we do not make substantial cuts in the projected levels of Pentagon spending, we will do substantial damage to our economy and dramatically reduce our quality of life.

We are not talking about cutting the money needed to supply American troops in the field. Once we send our men and women into battle, even in cases where we may have opposed going to war, we have an obligation to make sure that our servicemembers have everything they need. And we are not talking about cutting essential funds for combating terrorism; we must do everything possible to prevent any recurrence of the mass murder of Americans that took place on September 11, 2001.

Immediately after World War II, with much of the world devastated and the Soviet Union becoming increasingly aggressive, America took on the responsibility of protecting virtually every country that asked for it. Sixty-five years later, we continue to play that role long after there is any justification for it, and currently American military spending makes up approximately 44% of all such expenditures worldwide. The nations of Western Europe now collectively have greater resources at their command than we do, yet they continue to depend overwhelmingly on American taxpayers to provide for their defense. According to a recent article in the New York Times, "Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism. Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella."

When our democratic allies are menaced by larger, hostile powers, there is a strong argument to be made for supporting them. But the notion that American taxpayers get some benefit from extending our military might worldwide is deeply flawed. And the idea that as a superpower it is our duty to maintain stability by intervening in civil disorders virtually anywhere in the world often generates anger directed at us and may in the end do more harm than good.

We believe that the time has come for a much quicker withdrawal from Iraq than the President has proposed. We both voted against that war, but even for those who voted for it, there can be no justification for spending over $700 billion dollars of American taxpayers' money on direct military spending in Iraq since the war began, not including the massive, estimated long-term costs of the war. We have essentially taken on a referee role in a civil war, even mediating electoral disputes.

In order to create a systematic approach to reducing military spending, we have convened a Sustainable Defense Task Force consisting of experts on military expenditures that span the ideological spectrum. The task force has produced a detailed report with specific recommendations for cutting Pentagon spending by approximately $1 trillion over a ten year period. It calls for eliminating certain Cold War weapons and scaling back our commitments overseas. Even with these changes, the United States would still be immeasurably stronger than any nation with which we might be engaged, and the plan will in fact enhance our security rather than diminish it.

We are currently working to enlist the support of other members of Congress for our initiative. Along with our colleagues Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Walter Jones, we have addressed a letter to the President's National Committee on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which he has convened to develop concrete recommendations for reducing the budget deficit. We will make it clear to leaders of both parties that substantial reductions in military spending must be included in any future deficit reduction package. We pledge to oppose any proposal that fails to do so.

In the short term, rebuilding our economy and creating jobs will remain our nation's top priority. But it is essential that we begin to address the issue of excessive military spending in order to ensure prosperity in the future. We may not agree on what to do with the estimated $1 trillion in savings, but we do agree that nothing either of us cares deeply about will be possible if we do not begin to face this issue now.

Deficit calculator & Geithner's rosy debt projections

Look, Mom, I reduced the United States's national debt in 2020 to 37% of GDP using CEPR's Deficit Calculator!

This calculator allows users to pick various items and see how they'll shrink (or grow) the debt by 2020.

37% of one year's GDP may sound like a lot but it's actually a pittance, especially for an economy as big as the USA's. The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that if we continue on our present course, America's debt-to-GDP ratio will be 85% by 2020. That may be too optimistic.

A report by the Department of the Treasury estimated that by 2015 the net public debt will rise to $19.6 trillion. But as Zero Hedge's trenchant Tyler Durden explains, TreasSec Geithner's projection was based on unrealistically robust estimates of U.S. economic growth at 6% from 2011 to 2015. Check out Durden's cool charts where he plots believable estimates on top of the Treasury's rosy ones. Durden says we'll have well over a 120% debt-to-GDP ratio by 2015.

So anyway, how did I cut the deficit? Here were my choices:

Defense

> Quick end to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (30,000 regional troops by 2013)

> Cancel or delay various defense systems and platforms (like the boondoggle Osprey and F-35)

> Improve military efficiency

Environment

> Impose upstream price on GHG emissions

Health care

> Public option (save money, cover everybody, but grandma becomes Soylent Green -- good deal, right?)

> Negotiated Medicare drug prices

Social Security/Retirement

> Increase cap on taxable earnings to 90% (up from about 82% today)

> Progressive price indexing of Social Security

> Raising the normal retirement age of Social Security (increasing 2 months per year starting 2016, up to age 70 by 2040)

Spending

> Freeze nominal discretionary spending at 2013 level (education, research, transportation, DOJ, DOS, etc.)

Taxes

> Financial speculation tax (0.25% on sale or purchase of stock)

> Allow all of Bush's cuts in marginal rates to sunset

> Do not modify estate and gift tax rates when Bush's tax cuts expire

> Convert mortgage deduction with 15% credit

And voila! Painful, maybe. Effective, you bet. Play around with the choices and see how much you can cut the deficit. Unfortunately this calculator won't let you get down to the level of detail that some of you would prefer, for instance "Cancel all school lunches and afterschool programs," "Abolish Medicare, Social Security and the Department of Education," or "Cancel Congressional pensions and cut their pay by 50%." So, this calculator may be a bit simplistic but it gives you an accurate idea of the relative effect of each option on the U.S. budget deficit. You can also see how we'd compare to other countries's debt-to-GDP.

Security, opportunity costs, & 'puffer' machines

So it turns out that the explosive chemical powder PETN that Abdulmutallab used is easily detected by airport "puffer" machines during security screening. Only thing is, he never passed through one of those detectors in Nigeria, Holland, or the U.S.

You see, these puffer machines are expensive (about $160 K each), humidity and dirt make them break down often, and maintenance costs the TSA several $ million a year.

So about 100 of these puffer machines are sitting in storage, unused.

All I can say is... DWTF?!

The war in Afghanistan now costs us about $57,000 per minute. 3 minutes of fightin' evildoers over there could buy 1 "expensive" puffer machine; a minute more would easily pay for its annual maintenance. The money spent on 1 month of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan could cover the world's airports and train stations in puffer machines. We could afford to put one in every entrance of every mall in America.

Besides Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon is spending $ billions on laser weapons and space weapons -- really cool, high-tech stuff. And yet we can't develop an airport screening system that is fast, effective, and low-maintenance.

Can't, won't... or don't care? Or is it really what some have been arguing all along: the opportunity cost of "winning" over there is all the small, un-sexy but necessary things that keep us safe over here?

Hey, we're the freaking US of A, we can do anything we put our minds to! So, a rational person can only conclude that airport security -- and port and dam security, etc. -- are just not as important to our leaders as, say, faraway military adventures in godforsaken deserts. They -- Dubya, Obama, Congress -- pledged to keep us safe. So far, it seems that only al Qaeda's incompetence (and childish obsession with airplanes) and a strapping Dutch tourist are keeping us safe. In return for all the tax money and inconvenience we sacrifice for our supposed safety, our leaders owe us more.

Detroit explosive common, easily detectible

By Pamela Hess and Eileen Sullivan

December 28, 2009 | Associated Press

URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091228/ap_on_bi_ge/us_airliner_attack_explosive

Buchanan: Will Obama continue failed Israel policy?

By the way, Israel got about $2.4 billion in U.S. military aid in FY 2007, plus $130 million in standard economic aid.  (Why Israel needs economic aid is beyond me....).  And so, the U.S. is a state sponsor of Israeli aggression.  We Americans have blood on our hands right now.  U.S. military aid to Israel is a link as direct and causal as Iran's support for Hezzbollah and other terrorist organizations.

Look, I'm not one of those who say that the Jewish lobby controls U.S. foreign policy, but the fact is that if Obama threatens to reduce or (gasp!) cease U.S. military aid to Israel, he will be called by many, including the Israeli lobby, an anti-Semite, terrorist sympathizer, and a traitor. 

But does the oppression and ghettoization of 1.5 million Palestinians really reflect U.S. values and protect our interests?

Sadly, Obama is unlikely to reduce U.S. military aid or change U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine.  After all, the man wants to get re-elected.  And right now, the vast majority of Americans who care about this issue are the Israel-Jewish lobby, Christian Zionists, neocon hawks, and the Washington foreign policy establishment -- all of whom support current U.S. policy.  Only a surge of popular sympathy for the Palestinians' plight will grant Obama political cover to do the right thing; but most Americans have other problems on their minds.

In other words, the Palestinians are screwed. 


Bush, Obama and the Gaza Blitz
By Patrick J. Buchanan
December 30, 2008  |  HumanEvents.com

Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month ceasefire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza.

Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes in the War of 1948. One thousand were killed or wounded, as the Israeli Air Force conducted over a hundred strikes -- on graduation ceremonies for Hamas fighters, police stations and storage sites for rockets.

About Israel's right and duty to defend its border towns, there is no dispute. When Hamas permits Gaza to be used as a launch pad for rockets, it must expect retaliation. Nor can Hamas claim some right to dictate the limits of that retaliation.

Yet the wisdom of so savage a retribution for rockets that killed not one Israeli is open to question. And crass Israeli politics seems to be behind this premeditated and planned blitz.

With Likud's hawkish "Bibi" Netanyahu ahead in the polls for the Feb. 10 election, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Labor's candidate, had to show that he, too, could be ruthless with Hamas.

Kadima Party candidate and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has an even greater need than the highly decorated Barak to show toughness. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, departing in scandal, wants to exit in a blaze of glory, to blot out the memory of a botched war against Hezbollah that he launched in the summer of 2006.

However, while Israel's politicians all seem to have a stake in these devastating strikes, Israel herself will pay the price.

Given the casualty toll, over 300 dead and 1,300 wounded as of this writing, Hamas will have to exact its pound of flesh. The Hamas wing that seeks renewed war with Israel will now shout into silence the wing working with Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak on a new ceasefire.

The moderate Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, who has been talking to Israel, testifying to her good faith, has been made to appear the puppet and fool. A new intifada spreading to the West Bank, with suicide attacks inside Israel, is now possible.

Moderate Arabs, who have recognized Israel or backed peace, will now be seen by the Arab street as appeasers impotent to stop the public suffering of the Palestinian people.

As for President Bush's hopes of midwifing a peace that would create a Palestinian state, they are as dead as the Annapolis process he set in train. In advancing peace in the Middle East, Bush's eight-year record is now a near-absolute failure.

For four years, Bush refused to talk to Yasir Arafat, though Bill Clinton had negotiated with him, as had four Israeli prime ministers, two of who shared a Nobel Prize with Arafat.  In his second term, Bush, after insisting Hamas be included in free elections in Palestine, refused to recognize Hamas when it won those elections.

Arafat was a terrorist and Hamas is a terrorist organization, declared Bush, and we don't negotiate with terrorists. Yet, Bush de-listed Libya as a state sponsor of terror and sent Condi Rice to chat up Col. Gadhafi, though Gadhafi still has on his hands the blood of scores of American school kids from the Lockerbie massacre of 1989 that Libya and Gadhafi engineered.

For eight years, like the "dummy" in a hand of bridge, Bush has sat mute as his Israeli partner, Sharon or Olmert, played America's cards as well as their own. The Bush response to Saturday's carnage, as anticipated, was to blame Hamas for causing it and urge Israelis to be careful about civilian casualties as they go about their reprisals.

Whatever Israel decides, we support. For eight years that has been the most reliable guide to U.S. Middle East policy.

And Barack Obama? Forty-eight hours after the Israeli blitz began, he and his national security team remain silent.

Hopefully, Obama will bring with him a new Mideast policy, one made in the U.S.A., for the U.S.A. Hopefully, just as Israel has its private links to Syria through Turkey, to Hamas through Egypt and to Hezbollah, Obama will establish independent U.S. channels to all three, and adopt a separate U.S. policy toward all three, as Israel does.

While the United States must support Israel's right to defend her towns and to strike bases from which Israelis are being attacked, Obama should denounce the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, by Israel's cutting off their electricity in the dead of winter and denying them the food and medicine many need to survive.

[I'm dismayed at how the Jews, who survived the Nazi ghettos, then went on to create ghettos of collective punishment and poverty for the Palestinians.  Instead of using the lesson of their suffering to promote universal human dignity, Israeli Jews forfeited their moral authority and retreated into tribal politics.  Apparently they learned only one lesson from their suffering: to serve the interests of the Jewish people.  Sure, as the Rush Limbaughs and John Boltons of the world never cease to point out, Israel does exercise "restraint" in dealing with its "Palestinian problem."  But they mean restraint from all-out ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories -- which is what Nazis would do if they were in Israel's shoes.  So yes, Israel and its military patron America can take some moral comfort in knowing that they are not quite as bad as Nazis.  Hooray.  - J]

For us to remain silent in the face of this comports neither with our interests or our values. Israel's policy of withholding from the weak and innocent of Gaza, women and children, the necessities of life, to punish the guilty who rule at the point of a gun, is a policy that Obama should declare the United States will no longer support with [our] tax dollars.

AARP: 10,000 recent vets rely on parents' care

If you really "Support Our Troops," then you should be calling your Congressmen demanding increased federal spending on medical care for returning vets. Damn the cost. Our wounded heroes shouldn't have to rely on charity, or their parents in retirement, in order to survive. They shouldn't have to fight the Pentagon or VA bureaucracy. Our government should be bending over backwards to serve them.


When Wounded Vets Come Home

As more troops than ever are surviving the fearsome injuries of war, parents are increasingly being thrust into the role of long-term caregivers

By Barry Yeoman
July - August 2008 | AARPmagazine.org

[Excerpt:]

At that moment, Cynthia became one of a growing number of parents who are, by necessity, stepping back into the role of caregiver for their children who are returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with debilitating and often long-term injuries. According to officials from three national organizations—the Wounded Warrior Project, The Military Family Network, and the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes— an estimated 10,000 recent veterans of these conflicts now depend on their parents for their care. Working unheralded, these parents have quit jobs, shelved retirement plans, and relocated so they can be with their injured sons and daughters. Many have become warriors themselves, fighting to make sure this new wave of injured veterans gets the medical care and rehabilitation it needs.

These parent caregivers, many of them boomers and some older, face a 21st-century challenge: their children are coming home in unprecedented numbers with injuries that would have been fatal during earlier conflicts. "This is a war of disability, not a war of deaths," says former Army physician Ronald Glasser, M.D., author of Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq (George Braziller, 2006). "Its legacy is the orthopedics and neurology wards, not the cemetery." Not only have better helmets and body armor saved lives, but battlefield medicine now borders on miraculous. Someone arriving at the Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad, Iraq, has a 96 percent chance of survival. He or she can sometimes be stateside within 36 hours of the injury. As a result, there are just 6 deaths for every 100 injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with 28 deaths per 100 in Vietnam, and 38 in World War II, according to Linda Bilmes, a researcher at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

If this survival rate is heartening, the flip side is that many of these injuries are fearsome and require extended and complicated care. Part of the reason is that the nature of warfare has changed: today's troops face a constant threat of IEDs. When these makeshift bombs detonate, they throw off pressure waves so intense that bystanders' brains literally bang around in their skulls. "These are enormous explosions," says Glasser. "The physics are astonishing—they will turn over a 70-ton tank. Anyone caught in the blast wave is going to be in trouble." Sometimes injured brain tissue swells so dramatically that part of the skull must be removed to let the brain expand.

As of April 29 the Pentagon counted 31,848 wounded service members in the current conflicts. Independent experts say that is a conservative figure. They estimate the number of brain injuries alone might total 320,000, or 20 percent of the 1.64 million who have served so far—a number that S. Ward Casscells, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, calls "plausible." In addition to the physical injuries, there are thousands of cases of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Last year military screeners detected psychological symptoms in 31 percent of Marines, 38 percent of soldiers, and 49 percent of National Guardsmen returning from war.

Do YOU support our troops?

(Sigh). If only it were that simple.

And just FYI, a magnetic bumper sticker is not able in any way to "Support Our Troops." It takes money, honesty, and commitment from us citizens and our government to support the troops.

Are we really supporting our troops when all that we demand for them (as if we're doing them a favor!) is a continued presence in Iraq? Indeed, the real cost of war starts when they come home.


Our Armies, Ourselves
By Nancy Gibbs
May 15, 2008 | Time.com

Etched onto the wall of a sentry box in Gibraltar is an unsigned indictment from an unknown soldier. You imagine him there many wars ago, keeping watch and weighing his prospects for a normal life.

God and the soldier, all men adore

In time of danger and not before.

When the danger is passed and all things righted,

God is forgotten, and the soldier slighted.

President Kennedy quoted the verse in 1962 to the men of the Army's 1st Armored Division, who had been secretly moved into position during the Cuban missile crisis. "This country does not forget God or the soldier," Kennedy said. "Upon both we now depend."

How we treat returning soldiers once the parades have passed is a measure of a country's character and a government's competence. Often the war shadows the warriors: to the returning victors of World War II came honor and glory and the GI Bill. But for veterans of Korea--"the Forgotten War"--there was silence. Infantryman Fred Downs returned from Vietnam with four Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and one arm. Back in school, he was asked if he'd lost his arm in the war. Yes, he said. "Serves you right," he was told.

We've grown up since then, embraced complexity: it doesn't matter that nearly two-thirds of Americans say the Iraq war wasn't worth fighting; three-quarters say the government is not doing enough to help returning vets. They protect us when we hand them a rifle and say, "Go fight the enemy." We betray them when we hand them a pencil and say, "Now go fight the bureaucracy."

At least they're not fighting alone: Kennedy's promise to "not forget" is honored by every town that welcomes home its National Guard unit by helping members reconnect; by the ingenuity of groups like Sew Much Comfort, which provides "adaptive clothing" for vets with burns and other injuries, casts and prostheses. Mental-health professionals volunteer through Give an Hour to treat vets for free; pro bono lawyers help them navigate the dense disability-benefits maze. But private charity can't replace a public commitment to finish what we start, to do the long, hard, expensive work of making soldiers whole when they come home.

Wars are like icebergs: much of the cost remains hidden, and the near doubling of the defense budget since 2001 does not cover what lies ahead. Better body armor and trauma care mean new life for thousands of soldiers who would have died in any earlier war. But many are broken or burned or buried in pain from what they saw and did. One in five suffers from major depression or post-traumatic stress, says a new Rand Corp. study; more than 300,000 have suffered traumatic brain injury. The cost of treating them is projected to double over the next 25 years. Four hundred thousand veterans are waiting for cases to be processed. The number seeking assistance for homelessness is up 600% in the past year.

In the face of so much need, too often comes denial. At a May 6 hearing, lawmakers lit into officials from Veterans Affairs after an e-mail surfaced from Ira Katz, its chief of mental health, on suicide rates of soldiers in its care. The subject line: "Shhh." The VA had been insisting there were fewer than 800 suicide attempts a year by vets in its care; the real number was closer to 12,000. "Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" Katz asked. Bob Filner, chair of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, saw criminal negligence. "The pattern is deny, deny, deny," he told Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Peake. "Then when facts seemingly come to disagree with the denial, you cover up, cover up, cover up."

It took a YouTube video to scald the conscience of officials at Fort Bragg, where soldiers returned from 15 months in Afghanistan to a barracks festooned with filth, paint peeling in pages off the walls. "Soldiers should never have to live in such squalor," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who saw the video. "Things happen too slowly." But even if the system worked perfectly, it would still take billions of dollars to meet the need.

Memorial Day was designed to honor dead soldiers; the other 364 belong to the living. Of the private efforts there is much to be proud, for they reflect the best traditions of the country the soldiers are fighting for. But the holes they are patching reveal a system in tatters; the very least veterans deserve from their government is honesty about its failures.

Rev. Rausch: Is war the answer?

Are wars inevitable?

By Father John S. Rausch

May 8, 2008 | Spero News

The United States spends more on defense than all other nations combined. Considering the basic budget for the Department of Defense that covers salaries, operations and equipment and the supplemental budget that pays for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending bests the second military spender by nearly a factor of ten. The supplemental itself for funding the two wars looms larger than the combined military budgets of China and Russia.

In addition, the government has folded a variety of military-related expenditures into departments other than Defense. The Department of Energy FY 2008 will spend $23 billion on developing and maintaining nuclear warheads, and the State Department will distribute an additional $25 billion among allies as foreign military assistance.

Add in obligations with Veterans Affairs, military recruiting and Homeland Security, plus Military Retirement, the paramilitary activities of the FBI, outer space related security and interest for past debt-financed defense spending, and U.S. spending on its military establishment for the current year, according to Chalmers Johnson, professor emeritus at University of California, San Diego, reaches $1.1 trillion!

In a 2006 Angus Reid poll, 65 percent of Americans said the country has been "too quick to get American military forces involved" in conflicts. Instead, the American public supports more preventive security measures like diplomacy, nuclear nonproliferation, peacekeeping and foreign aid.

A 2007 World Public Opinion poll found 78 percent of Americans "believe that all countries should eliminate their nuclear weapons" through a well-coordinated international verification system. Yet, the military budget continues to grow and has more than doubled since the end of the Cold War.

Behind the expanded military budget lies certain structural reasons for this aggressive spending. Prior to World War II, the U.S. had no dedicated arms industry. In time of war, manufacturers would convert their facilities from producing consumer goods to military hardware. That changed after the war.

In his Farewell Address to the Nation in 1961, President Eisenhower confessed, "...we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions." Yet, later in the speech he issued his famous warning: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial-complex."

Eisenhower recognized the need for arms manufacturers, yet emphasized their dangers. Originally, his notable phrase read: "the military-industrial-congressional-complex," though he chose to drop the one term in the final draft of the speech.

Yet, Congressional representatives get reelected when they bring home federal money to their districts, and arms manufacturers make profit when they sell weapons to the government. Killing a weapons system becomes near impossible because of the economic and political impact. The F/A-22 "Raptor" fighter jet, for example, designed to counter a Soviet aircraft that was never built, has one thousand subcontractors in 42 states.

People of faith recognize morally troubling aspects of the military-industrial-congressional-complex. Plainly, the opportunity cost–what could have been purchased instead of military items–represents a matter of justice. The catastrophe of a bridge collapse in Minnesota and the levees' failure in New Orleans represent essential infrastructure problems overlooked while unnecessary weapons get funded.

Morally, opportunity costs represent choices: eradicate polio worldwide or do 3 tests of the missile defense system; vaccinate 10 million children worldwide or buy 6 Trident II missiles; provide health coverage for 7 million children or fund the nuclear weapons program for one year.

The words of Paul VI remain true today: "If you want peace, work for justice." Justice demands we rethink the military-industrial-congressional-complex that robs society of essential goods and services while raising the threat of more and longer wars.

Rev. John S. Rausch is a Roman Catholic priest serving the communities of the Appalachian region of the US.

Stiglitz on true, hidden cost of war

Nobel laureat Joseph Stiglitz reveals true cost of war during Kellogg visit
By Matt Golosinski
April 21, 2008

The United States is bleeding money. That's the alarm sounded by Joseph Stiglitz in his new book The Three Trillion Dollar War, a narrative that details what he and co-author Linda Bilmes, a Harvard professor of public finance, say are the staggering hidden costs of America's current Iraq War. He brought his discussion to the Kellogg School on April 18, speaking to a capacity audience from Kellogg and the larger Northwestern University and Evanston communities.

To hear the former World Bank chief economist and senior vice president detail the economic circumstances associated with the conflict, now in its fifth year and costing U.S. taxpayers $12 billion each month, is to enter a realm that rivals the bleak, madcap world conjured by Joseph Heller's classic satire Catch-22. For Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel Prize winner, the tragedy of war is compounded by significant — and deliberate, he contends — flaws in how the Bush Administration has accounted for the war's expenses.

Citing the broader economic implications that extend beyond official budgetary figures that he said obscure the war's reality, Stiglitz believes the U.S. government is "vastly undervaluing" the war's impact on the economy, including its negative influence through lost opportunities that might otherwise shore up domestic infrastructure and education or enhance technological innovation. Stiglitz calculated that one-sixth of the Iraq War's cost would fund Social Security for the next 75 years, while "just a few days of fighting" would provide healthcare to all U.S. citizens currently lacking it.

By using a cash accounting system that minimizes up-front costs while obscuring or ignoring massive long-term expenditures, such as those associated with equipment repair and replacement or healthcare outlays for soldiers injured or killed in the war, the U.S. government has convinced some Americans that the Iraq conflict carries a far more modest price tag than Stiglitz and Bilmes say is accurate. In fact, Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia Business School, believes his own $3 trillion figure is "conservative." The real figure may be closer to $4 or even $5 trillion, he said, noting that the Bush Administration's current tally is only $600 billion — dramatically larger than its initial estimate of $50 to $60 billion, but well off the mark that Stiglitz has calculated using what he considers a more accurate system called accrual accounting. He said that this approach assesses many of the inevitable future costs associated with the war, including demobilization and restoring the military to its pre-war strength. But chief among these costs is long-term care for those killed or disabled by the conflict, expenses that Stiglitz said will continue for the next 50 years.

"Disability costs are a big chunk of change," he told the audience in the Kellogg School's James L. Allen Center, noting that the country is paying about $4.3 billion a year in healthcare for those soldiers injured in the first Iraq War, which lasted only 100 days in 1991. "Today, the costs of a years-long war will surely be much greater and will go on for decades," Stiglitz said, adding that improved battleground medical treatment has resulted in more soldiers surviving — his figures were 15 for every 1 fatality — a favorable development, but one that carries significant lifelong costs to care for those people. "We have created an unfunded entitlement as big as the hole in our healthcare system."

While the Bush Administration's cash accounting practice gives the appearance of fewer expenses, Stiglitz said it also drives short-term decisions that can have deadly consequences. He cited the examples of soldiers who were issued no body armor early in the war, or those whose vehicles were inadequately armored against improvised explosive devices. Equally troubling, he said, were instances of soldiers who, after being maimed and hospitalized, discovered that they were docked by the military for the remainder of their contracted service pay. (Congress is likely to change this policy soon, Stiglitz said.)

Deliberate accounting choices also play a part in the United States' official tally of its soldiers killed or injured in Iraq, Stiglitz said. Official injury numbers represent only half of the actual total, he said, citing data he and Bilmes obtained from veterans' organizations who themselves had to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the full statistics released. The government, Stiglitz indicated, only counts injuries it considers the result of direct hostile conflict, not those it reckons as accidents. As an example, he noted that any U.S. casualties from a helicopter shot down during daylight fighting would be numbered among the official tally. If that same helicopter, flying at night because day travel is too dangerous, crashes without coming under enemy fire, the injuries are not officially tabulated as battle casualties, Stiglitz said. Importantly, however, the U.S. taxpayer will be responsible for funding all such war injuries, whether or not these appear as "official" in government records.

In addition, the economics surrounding how the war is being fought — with significant privatization through contractors like Blackwater and Halliburton — creates "perverse incentives," according to Stiglitz. With salaries up to five times higher for private security forces, the U.S. military is faced with serious financial challenges when trying to recruit talent or retain those eligible for discharge at the end of their tours. "The administration wanted to convince citizens that we can do war on the cheap," Stiglitz said, but its policies actually have increased the military's costs since the armed services must now offer more money in salary and bonuses to compete with private contractors.

Stiglitz also pointed to what he considered broader economic mistakes made during the last eight years of the Bush Administration, which have contributed to the U.S. deficit ballooning from $6 trillion to $9 trillion, with about a third of that increase "directly due to the Iraq War," according to Stiglitz. What's more, that economic circumstance has resulted in some 40 percent of war costs actually being funded by foreign countries, through investments in instruments such as Treasury bonds, a situation Stiglitz said leaves the United States "more vulnerable to global volatility." He faulted "lax regulation" and a "reckless increase in liquidity" by the Federal Reserve under former Chairman Alan Greenspan and current Chairman Ben Bernanke as contributing to the recent real estate bubble and credit crunch, and considered this fiscal policy an attempt to prop up a fundamentally flawed economy whose collapse during the early years of the war could have eroded public support for the military intervention.

Stiglitz, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1995-1997, also criticized the Bush Administration for cutting taxes during wartime, thereby passing the costs on to future generations.

For the first time in U.S. history, "We have put this war entirely on our credit card," he said.

Opportunity cost of Iraq's $2-3 trillion price tag

If death, destruction, and misery don't bother you, then maybe this ($$$) will....


The $2 trillion nightmare
By Bob Herbert
March 4, 2008 | International Herald Tribune

We Americans have been hearing a lot about "Saturday Night Live" and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more.

There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war - not just the cost to taxpayers - will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. "For a fraction of the cost of this war," said Stiglitz, "we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more."

Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put "on a more sustainable basis." And he cited the committee's own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

What we're getting instead is the stuff of nightmares. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to document, among other things, some of the less obvious costs of the war.

These include the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans. Those costs will be with us for decades.

Stiglitz noted that nearly 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first Gulf War, which lasted just one month, have become eligible for disability benefits. The current war is approaching five years in duration.

"Imagine then," said Stiglitz, "what a war that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at VA hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems."

The Bush administration has tried its best to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through "emergency" appropriations that get far less scrutiny.

Even the most basic wartime information is difficult to come by.

Stiglitz, who has written a new book with Bilmes called "The Three Trillion Dollar War," said they had to go to veterans' groups, who in turn had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act, just to find out how many Americans had been injured in Iraq.

Stiglitz and Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.

"Normally, when America goes to war, nonessential spending programs are reduced to make room in the budget for the higher costs of the war," Hormats told the committee. "Individual programs that benefit specific constituencies are sacrificed for the common good. . . And taxes have never been cut during a major American war. For example, President Eisenhower adamantly resisted pressure from Senate Republicans for a tax cut during the Korean War."

Said Stiglitz: "Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits.

"The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself. . . By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion."

Some former presidents - Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower - were quoted at the hearing on the need for accountability and shared sacrifice during wartime. But this is the 21st century.

That ancient rhetoric can hardly be expected to compete for media attention, even in a time of war, with the giddy fun of the campaign.

It's a new era.