The Rag Blog

With March 20 marking the fifth anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq, it’s time to take stock of what has happened.

In our new book The Three Trillion Dollar War, Harvard’s Linda Bilmes and I conservatively estimate the economic cost of the war to the U.S. to be $3 trillion, and the costs to the rest of the world to be another $3 trillion – far higher than the Bush administration’s estimates before the war.

The Bush team not only misled the world about the war’s possible costs, but has also sought to obscure the costs as the war has gone on.

This is not surprising. After all, the Bush administration lied about everything else, from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction to his supposed link with Al Qaeda. Indeed, only after the U.S.-led invasion did Iraq become a breeding ground for terrorists.

The Bush administration said the war would cost $50 billion. The U.S. now spends that amount in Iraq every three months.

To put that number in context: For one-sixth of the cost of the war, the U.S. could put its social security system on a sound footing for more than a half-century, without cutting benefits or raising contributions.

Moreover, the Bush administration cut taxes for the rich as it went to war, despite running a budget deficit. As a result, it has had to use deficit spending – much of it financed from abroad – to pay for the war.

This is the first war in American history that has not demanded some sacrifice from citizens through higher taxes; instead, the entire cost is being passed onto future generations.

Unless things change, the U.S. national debt – which was $5.7 trillion when Bush became president – will be $2 trillion higher because of the war (in addition to the $800 billion increase under Bush before the war).

Was this incompetence or dishonesty?

Almost surely both.

Cash accounting meant that the Bush administration focused on today’s costs, not future costs, including disability and health care for returning veterans.

Only years after the war began did the administration order the specially armoured vehicles that would have saved the lives of many killed by roadside bombs.

Not wanting to reintroduce a draft, and finding it difficult to recruit for an unpopular war, troops have been forced into two, three or four stress-filled deployments.

The administration has tried to keep the war’s costs from the American public. Veterans groups have used the Freedom of Information Act to discover the total number of injured – 15 times the number of fatalities.

Already, 52,000 returning veterans have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The U.S. government will need to provide disability compensation to an estimated 40 per cent of the 1.65 million troops that have already been deployed.

And, of course, the bleeding will continue as long as the war continues, with the health-care and disability bill amounting to more than $600 billion (in present-value terms).

Ideology and profiteering have also played a role in driving up the war’s costs. America has relied on private contractors, which have not come cheap.

A Blackwater Security guard can cost more than $1,000 per day, not including disability and life insurance, which is paid for by the government.

When unemployment rates in Iraq soared to 60 per cent, hiring Iraqis would have made sense; but the contractors preferred to import cheap labour from Nepal, the Philippines and other countries.

The war has had only two winners: oil companies and defence contractors. The stock price of Halliburton, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s old company, has soared. But even as the government turned increasingly to contractors, it reduced its oversight.

The largest cost of this mismanaged war has been borne by Iraq. Half of Iraq’s doctors have been killed or have left the country, unemployment stands at 25 per cent and, five years after the war’s start, Baghdad still has less than eight hours of electricity a day.

Out of Iraq’s total population of around 28 million, 4 million are displaced and 2 million have fled the country.

The thousands of violent deaths have inured most Westerners to what is going on: A bomb blast that kills 25 hardly seems newsworthy anymore.

But statistical studies of death rates before and after the invasion tell some of the grim reality. They suggest additional deaths from a low of around 450,000 in the first 40 months of the war (150,000 of them violent deaths) to 600,000.

With so many people in Iraq suffering so much in so many ways, it may seem callous to discuss the economic costs.

And it may seem particularly self-absorbed to focus on the economic costs to America, which embarked on this war in violation of international law. But the economic costs are enormous, and they go well beyond budgetary outlays.

Americans like to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Nor is there such a thing as a free war. The U.S. – and the world – will be paying the price for decades to come.

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, is professor of economics at Columbia University and co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.

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From David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

John McCain runs for George Bush’s third term
By Juan Cole

Based on his policies and the company he keeps, this year’s Republican presidential candidate sounds a lot like the guy who ran in 2000 and 2004.

March 12, 2008 | The most important thing about the endorsements proffered to John McCain by George W. Bush and evangelist John Hagee last week was McCain’s reaction to them. The freshly minted Republican nominee for president, who has had harsh words in the past for both Bush’s policies and evangelical “agents of intolerance,” meekly accepted their support. He knows he cannot win in November if the evangelicals and pro-war conservatives stay home. How far will McCain go in presenting himself as Son of Bush in order to energize his party’s base? To date, based on his willingness to embrace the Bush agenda and to associate with religious extremists, the answer seems to be pretty far indeed.

When John McCain went to the White House last week, President Bush seemed to be offering him an out. Bush “welcomed” McCain as “the Republican nominee” in his official statement, but didn’t initially use the word “endorse.” It was McCain who leapt for the e-word. “Well, I’m very honored and humbled,” said McCain, “to have the opportunity to receive the endorsement of the President of the United States, a man who I have great admiration, respect and affection [for].”

McCain’s strategists, meanwhile, are said to be privately plotting how best to deploy the deeply unpopular Bush, perhaps by quietly sending him to host fundraisers deep inside red states where he would not risk alienating the general population from McCain. But McCain is hewing so faithfully to Bush’s legacy he may need no help from the man himself in alienating the population.

Whereas in his 2000 presidential bid, the Arizona senator sharply criticized Bush for appearing at the anti-Catholic Bob Jones University, which at that time also still banned interracial dating, he is less vocal about such matters now. He is himself behaving as Bush did then. McCain once dismissed evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance.” But last week the senator embraced Hagee’s endorsement. Talk about an agent of intolerance! Hagee is like Pat Robertson on steroids.

The Democratic National Committee was quick to point out that Hagee said that Jews have faced persecution “right up to this very day” because they rejected Jesus and so demonstrated “disobedience and rebellion” toward Jehovah. He said that the difference between a woman with premenstrual syndrome and a terrorist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist. He said that Katrina was divine punishment on New Orleans for its sinfulness, and on gays for planning a parade there. He said that Roman Catholics were linked with Hitler “in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews,” and called the Catholic Church “the Great Whore.” He suggested a faux “slave auction” as a church fundraiser. He told a startled Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” that the Quran directs Muslims to kill Christians and Jews. (In fact the Quran recognizes Christians and Jews as “people of scripture” and only urges the early Muslims to fight back against the militant “infidels” or polytheists who were trying to wipe them out.)

McCain reacted warmly to Hagee’s endorsement, saying, “I am very proud of Pastor John Hagee’s spiritual leadership to thousands of people and I am proud of his commitment to the independence and the freedom of the state of Israel.” (Apparently for Hagee Israel is good, even if Jews are bad.) Pressed by Roman Catholics and others, McCain refused to distance himself from the pastor, saying only, “In no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee’s views, which I obviously do not.” This non-disavowing disavowal has not satisfied most of the people offended by McCain’s having associated himself with Hagee.

Hagee’s endorsement is McCain’s “Bob Jones moment,” taken from the W. playbook of 2000. In other respects, McCain is trying to repeat Bush’s big win of 2004, when he fended off a near-upset by a weak Democratic candidate by doubling down on fear. McCain has adopted foreign policy and domestic stances similar to those of Bush’s successful reelection run.

In July of 2004, Bush abruptly announced that he was looking into whether Iran played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., and accused the Shiite ayatollahs of Tehran of harboring al-Qaida operatives, who are Sunnis. The whole fantastic set of allegations was immediately denied by Bush’s own intelligence officials. Hawkishness toward Iran was one way for Bush to take the focus off his failures in Iraq. Bush by his belligerence appealed to a combination of evangelical holy warriors and so-called national-security conservatives, and McCain seems poised to move in the same direction.

Echoing Bush’s fear-mongering about the Islamic world, which by August 2006, two years after his reelection, regularly included references to so-called Islamic fascism, McCain maintains that the “transcendent” challenge facing the United States in 2008 is “radical Islamic extremism.” McCain alleges that “al-Qaida in Iraq” will “follow us home” if the U.S. withdraws from that country. McCain takes this line even though most Muslim countries are close allies of the United States and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida has been revealed to be a small fringe, now in disarray.

Hagee’s endorsement, meanwhile, brings more than white Protestant intolerance to the table. The organization he founded, Christians United for Israel, is lobbying for a war on Iran and dismisses last fall’s National Intelligence Estimate finding that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program as “incompetent.” McCain himself has joked about bombing Iran, to the tune of an old Beach Boys song.

Read the rest here.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett on Waterboarding

U.S. Congressman Lloyd Doggett today [11 March 2008] spoke on the House floor on the override of President Bush’s veto of the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2008 that would have banned the practice of waterboarding.

In his remarks, Rep. Doggett cited the 1983 conviction of San Jacinto County Sheriff James C. Parker, who according to court records subjected prisoners to waterboarding.

Hear This Hammer Ring
by Sarah Browning

Don’t you hear this hammer ring?

I’m gonna split this rock

And split it wide!

When I split this rock,

Stand by my side.

– Langston Hughes

When we first began organizing the Split This Rock Poetry Festival about a year and a half ago, I told people that we’d chosen the date to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I can’t tell you how many asked us, “Oh, do you think the war will still be going on then?”

My first reaction was, “What are you smoking?”

But slowly it dawned on me that many people did not recognize what had happened in our country after September 11. Of the three wars the Bush administration is currently waging, the U.S. public is selectively aware of only the one that is devastating the country of Iraq, killing countless Iraqi civilians and thousands of U.S. service members. The public has a growing awareness of the administration’s second war – on U.S. foreign policy. The Bush administration and its neocon theorists have committed us to worldwide, perpetual, preemptive war. They have made the notion that we can bomb our way to “security” the main tenet our nation’s foreign policy.

The third war, however, has gone virtually unnoticed. The administration is at war with language.

Word War III

In this new paradigm the word is no longer valued for its power of negotiation, diplomacy, understanding, but only for its power to control, to pacify. It’s an age-old technique, to repeat the same flattened phrases over and over until they become accepted wisdom. But with a complicit mass media, propaganda is easier than ever to perpetuate. The latest “spin”: The surge is working. The surge is working. The surge is working. Repetition does not, however, change the facts on the ground.

Which is why we need poetry now, more than ever. We need poets to tell the complex human story. Poets cut through the fog of propaganda and remind us of the real consequences of our government’s actions. As the poet and essayist Martín Espada, who will be reading on the opening night of Split This Rock, says, we need poetry to give politics a human face. Poetry reminds us of what matters. It wakes us up. With its immediacy and idiosyncrasy and great heart, it shakes us from our despair.

Poets have taken up this challenge, uniting against the war in Iraq with unprecedented public action. Split This Rock originates in the Poets Against War movement, spurred by the leadership of Sam Hamill. Here in the capital city, DC Poets Against the War has been active for five years, reading at demonstrations, in schools, churches, libraries, community centers, night clubs, and cafes. We’ve published two anthologies and organized poets’ delegations to march in the national peace demonstrations, carrying lines of poetry through the streets of Washington.

As this election year approached and we were hearing more about the powerful activism of poets all over the country, we decided the time had come to step it up. Uniquely situated here in the nation’s capital, we felt it our obligation to provide a national forum that could bring poets together, celebrate and publicize their art and their activism, and build bonds across differences of geography, age, race and ethnicity, social class, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and poetic style. We hope to make Split This Rock a regular event – every other year, perhaps – and to nurture and support this nascent community that is just beginning to be born.

Read all of it here.

From Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

Warfare and Healthcare
by Norman Solomon

It’s kind of logical. In a pathological way.

A country that devotes a vast array of resources to killing capabilities will steadily undermine its potential for healing. For social justice. For healthcare as a human right.

Martin Luther King Jr. described the horrific trendline four decades ago: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

If a society keeps approaching spiritual death, it’s apt to arrive. Here’s an indicator: Nearly one in six Americans has no health insurance, and tens of millions of others are badly under-insured. Here’s another: The United States, the world’s preeminent warfare state, now spends about $2 billion per day on military pursuits.

Gaining healthcare for all will require overcoming the priorities of the warfare state. That’s the genuine logic behind the new “Healthcare NOT Warfare” campaign.

I remember the ferocious media debate over the proper government role in healthcare — 43 years ago. As the spring of 1965 got underway, the bombast was splattering across front pages and flying through airwaves. Many commentators warned that a proposal for a vast new program would bring “socialism” and destroy the sanctity of the free-enterprise system. The new federal program was called Medicare.

These days, when speaking on campuses, I bring up current proposals for a “single payer” system — in effect, Medicare for Americans of all ages. Most students seem to think it’s a good idea. But once in a while, someone vocally objects that such an arrangement would be “socialism.” The objection takes me back to the media uproar of early 1965.

Today, we’re left with the unfulfilled potential of Medicare for all. It could make healthcare real as a human right. And it could spare our society a massive amount of money now going to administrative costs and corporate gouging. At last count, annual insurance-industry profits reached $57.5 billion in 2006.

On Capitol Hill, lobbyists for the corporate profiteers are determined to block H.R. 676, the bill to create a universal single-payer system to implement healthcare as a human right.

In the current presidential campaign, none of the major candidates can be heard raising the possibility of ejecting the gargantuan insurance industry from the nation’s healthcare system. Instead, there’s plenty of nattering about whether “mandates” are a good idea. Hillary Clinton even has the audacity (not of hope but of duplicity) to equate proposed healthcare “mandates” with the must-pay-in requirements that sustain Social Security and Medicare.

Read all of it here.

Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Monday, March 10, 2008

WASHINGTON — An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn’t due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.

President Bush and his aides used Saddam’s alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had “bulletproof” evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam’s secular dictatorship.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” he said.

The new study, entitled “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents”, was essentially completed last year and has been undergoing what one U.S. intelligence official described as a “painful” declassification review.

It was produced by a federally-funded think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, under contract to the Norfolk, Va.-based U.S. Joint Forces Command.

Spokesmen for the Joint Forces Command declined to comment until the report is released. One of the report’s authors, Kevin Woods, also declined to comment.

Read the rest here.

Bush in December 2002: War “Inevitable”
From Democracy Now / March 10, 2008

One of the key architects of the Iraq war has revealed new information on the run-up to the invasion. In a new book defending the war and his own role in planning it, former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith quotes President Bush as telling a National Security Council meeting in December 2002 that “war is inevitable.”

The statement came weeks before UN weapons inspectors reported their findings in Iraq and months before Bush delivered his ultimatum that Saddam Hussein leave the country or face invasion.

Feith also criticizes former Secretary of State Colin Powell for publicly cultivating an image as a war skeptic without ever expressing any private opposition. The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to release a long-awaited report this week on the Bush administration’s intelligence claims in the run-up to invading Iraq.

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I mean, read the first sentence of what Junior says. Read it!!!

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Be Afraid, Bush. Be Very Afraid.
By Jerome Doolittle

Still mongering fear after all these years of plummeting polls, America’s protector spake thus this week to his troops at the Department of Homeland Security:

We’re in a battle with evil men — I call them evil because if you murder the innocent to achieve a political objective, you’re evil.

The events of September the 11th, 2001 demonstrated the threats of a new era. I say “new” because we found that oceans which separate us from separate — different continents no longer separate us from danger. We saw the cruelty of the terrorists and extremists, and we glimpsed the future they intend for us. In other words, there’s some serious lessons on September the 11th that it’s important for all Americans to remember.

Two years ago, Osama bin Laden warned the American people: “Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished.” All of us, particularly those charged with protecting the American people, need to take the words of this enemy very seriously. And I know you do.

At this moment, somewhere in the world, a terrorist is planning an attack on us. I know that’s an inconvenient thought for some, but it is the truth. And the people in this hall understand that truth. We have no greater responsibility, no greater charge, than to stop our enemies and to protect our fellow citizens.

The wonder of it all is that the nation doesn’t collapse in laughter or shame or both when Bush trots out this evildoer stuff. Let us start by understanding that most fights are not between a good guy and a bad guy. Most fights are between two bad guys. The good guys aren’t hanging around bars looking for trouble; they’re home playing with the kids or watching other people fight on TV.

So, in the interest of reason and common sense, let’s drop all this crap about what a rotten swine Saddam was. Of course he was. He deserved to die a thousand times over.

Let’s put him at ten on the evil meter, okay? And let’s assume that leaving this butcher in power over the last five years would have resulted in the murders of 100,000 innocent Iraqis.

Now let’s do the math, our unit of measurement being Iraqi corpses. According to every calculation of Iraqi casualties, even the Pentagon’s, George W. Bush outscores Saddam on the evil meter by at least five to one and probably closer to ten to one.

Set against that pile of corpses Bush’s good intentions will count for nothing when his personal End Time comes. St. Peter knows what the road to hell is paved with; if Bush actually believes in a Judgment Day, he’d better hope he’s wrong.

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