The Rag Blog

CLEVELAND (May 1) – A static-filled recording of war protesters yelling, followed by a voice and gunfire, was released Tuesday by a survivor of the Kent State University shooting who claims the tape proves a military order was given to fire on demonstrators.

“The evidence speaks for itself,” said Alan Canfora, 58, one of nine students wounded during the National Guard shooting. Four students were killed in the 1970 shootings, which followed several days of protests over the Vietnam War.

Canfora played two versions of the tape – the original and an amplified version – in which he says a Guard officer issues the command, “Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!”

To the casual listener, the word “point” can be heard followed by the sound of shots being fired. There is no indication on the tape of who said the word.

The tape, played to a group of reporters and students at a small university theater, was given to Yale University for its Kent State archives in 1979 by an attorney who represented students in a lawsuit filed against the state over the shooting, Canfora said. He found out about the tape six months ago while researching the shooting.

The first British soldier ever convicted of a war crime was officially dismissed from the Army on Monday and sent to jail to serve out a one-year sentence for the inhumane treatment of civilian detainees in Basra in 2003.

Following the hearing, a member of Payne’s legal team indicated that the condemned soldier, reportedly feeling abandoned by the Army and his superiors, may be ready to talk about others involved in the abuse of prisoners.

The case originated from Payne’s time stationed at the Basra Detention Center, where he and other soldiers enacted harsh treatment on detainees under their supervision, beating one to death. Baha Mousa had evidence of ninety-three separate wounds after his death. Six other soldiers were cleared of charges in Mousa’s death.

Payne himself was earlier cleared of manslaughter and perverting the course of justice by a court martial, but admissions he made during those proceedings led him to be charged with war crimes under the International Criminal Court Act 2001.

This “liberation” has done us in.
There is not one person I know who has not been affected and whose life has not been altered, read – forever changed by so much “liberation”.

You don’t even have to be an Iraqi. This “liberation” has served as a perfect mirror reflecting the moral bankruptcy of some and the resilience of others…

Those who are faithful to Iraq – the concept of it – (now we are talking about concepts since the Reality of what was Iraq is something of the past!), those who are close to Iraq in spirit and mind lose sleep too…

I have received tons of mails from all over the world. Africa, India, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the USA.

Those who are close to Iraq in spirit feel alienated from their peers. They suddenly feel out of place, they suddenly no longer feel as if they belong to what was deemed a “familiar” environment. This “liberation” has affected them too…
Seems they, too, are as unable to handle so much “freedom”…
But they are a minority. I like to call them the “feeling” minority. These people and all honors to them have not lost the capacity to feel…Praise them for they have become a rare breed.

Some write to me expressing their own pain, some write to me telling me how they feel strangers in their own land and some write to me thanking me for “freeing” them with my anger…giving them that inner space and permission to express the repressed taboos of the “politically correct”, to formulate their own anger vis a vis the lies and the deceptions…
And they write to me expressing their disgust.

Something about this Iraqi “liberation” is viscerally disgusting…

Something about it, something out of this world… Something unseen before, something unfathomable…

As if all the dirt and the scum of the Earth has risen to the surface like the sewage of the streets of Baghdad…

As if this Earth has not stopped vomiting all of its foul bitter acid bile …covering the whole land of Ur with it.

Never, at least not to my knowledge, has a “liberation” produced so much human filth…
Never has a “liberation” managed to generate so many death mercenaries and contractors being paid up to 5’000 dollars a day with the sole aim of exterminating…and “pacifying”.
Never has a country been so openly plundered and pillaged right in front of everyone’s eyes and to the utter silence of its spectators…
Never have so many atrocities of an unspeakable kind, not even seen in the worst horror films go by under an aura of such great detached indifference…

When I mention that cadavers are deliberately left lying in the streets until they are bloated by death or chewed at by wild dogs, I am not believed…I am called extraordinary with extraordinary claims.
I am told, surely the civilized world will not allow that!?. I am then asked to prove it.
Like do you want me to send you a corpse by DHL or should I ask one of the mercenaries of Blackwater Inc. to carry one in his suitcase, courtesy of the Crusaders?

When I write to “friends” that some children are seen playing football with the skull of a dead man, something that has been confirmed by the Arab League Ambassador to Baghdad, I am told that I need psychiatric help…Surely no “liberation” will drive children to play ball with heads ?!

When I am told, that some members of a sectarian militias like the Badr Brigades or Mahdi Army of Iran presented a sunni woman with her baby boy roasted and on platter delivered in front of her doorsteps…I say to myself surely this “liberation” cannot give birth to so much cannibalism…and that maybe I do need psychiatric care after all.

When am told that an elderly woman waiting for her son in some street in Baghdad is presented with a plastic bag with her son in it in pieces…I feel I am watching a third rate horror show…and maybe I am having audible hallucinations.

But this is the reality of the Iraqi “liberation”.
All these base, bestial, sadistic, psychopathic impulses have been unleashed and encouraged to flourish…

Iraq , the mirror of the West’s “suppressed” bestiality? I leave you to ponder on this one.

Let’s be clear about what it is — when it comes to “withdrawal” from Iraq — that the President will veto this Wednesday. Section 1904(b) of the supplemental appropriations bill for the Pentagon, H.R. 1591, passed by the House and Senate, mandates that the Secretary of Defense “commence the redeployment of the Armed Forces from Iraq not later than October 1, 2007, with a goal of completing such redeployment within 180 days.” If you’ve been listening to network TV news shows or reading your local newspaper with less than an eagle eye, you might well be under the impression that — just as the phrasing above seems to indicate — a Democratic-controlled Congress has just passed a bill that mandates a full-scale American withdrawal from Iraq. (Reporters and commentators regularly speak of the Democrats’ insistence that “American troops be withdrawn from Iraq.”) But that’s only until you start reading the exceptions embedded in the bill.

Here are the main ones. According to H.R. 1591, the Secretary of Defense is allowed to keep U.S. forces in Iraq for the following purposes:

1. “Protecting American diplomatic facilities and American citizens, including members of the United States Armed Forces”: This doesn’t sound like much, but don’t be fooled. As a start, of course, there would have to be forces guarding the new American embassy in Baghdad (known to Iraqis as “George W’s Palace”). When completed, it will be the largest embassy in the known universe with untold thousands of employees; then there would need to be forces to protect the heavily fortified citadel of the Green Zone (aka “the International Zone”) which protects the embassy and other key U.S. facilities. Add to these troops to guard the network of gigantic, multibillion dollar U.S. bases in Iraq like Balad Air Base (with air traffic volume that rivals Chicago’s O’Hare) and whatever smaller outposts might be maintained. We’re talking about a sizable force here.

2. “Training and equipping members of the Iraqi Security Forces”: By later this year, U.S. advisors and trainers for the Iraqi military, part of a program the Pentagon is now ramping up, should reach the 10,000-20,000 range (many of whom — see above — would undoubtedly need “guarding”).

3. “Engaging in targeted special actions limited in duration and scope to killing or capturing members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with global reach”: This is a loophole of loopholes that could add up to almost anything as, in a pinch, all sorts of Sunni oppositional forces could be labeled “al-Qaeda.”

An Institute for Policy Studies analysis suggests that the “protection forces” and advisors alone could add up to 40,000-60,000 troops. None of this, of course, includes U.S. Navy or Air Force units stationed outside Iraq but engaged in actions in, or support for actions in, that country.

Another way of thinking about the Democratic withdrawal proposals (to be vetoed this week by the President) is that they represent a program to remove only U.S. “combat brigades,” adding up to perhaps half of all U.S. forces, with a giant al-Qaeda loophole for their return. None of this would deal with the heavily armed and fortified U.S. permanent bases in Iraq or the air war that would almost certainly escalate if only part of the American expeditionary forces were withdrawn (and the rest potentially left more vulnerable).

No less strikingly, in an era in which the “privatizing” of state functions is the rage, the enormous mercenary forces of private “security” companies like Blackwater USA, now fighting a shadow war alongside U.S. troops in Iraq, would be untouched. On this striking point Jeremy Scahill has much to say — and he should know. He’s the author of the surprise national bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which will shake you to your combat boots when it comes to the nature of the mercenary age — sorry, the age of “private security contractors” — that we’ve now entered. No personal library that claims to make sense of our messy, bloody planet should be without his book. Tom

We know that capitalism is not just the most sensible way to organize an economy but is now the only possible way to organize an economy. We know that dissenters to this conventional wisdom can, and should, be ignored. There’s no longer even any need to persecute such heretics; they are obviously irrelevant.

How do we know all this? Because we are told so, relentlessly — typically by those who have the most to gain from such a claim, most notably those in the business world and their functionaries and apologists in the schools, universities, mass media, and mainstream politics. Capitalism is not a choice, but rather simply is, like a state of nature. Maybe not like a state of nature, but the state of nature. To contest capitalism these days is like arguing against the air that we breathe. Arguing against capitalism, we’re told, is simply crazy.

We are told, over and over, that capitalism is not just the system we have, but the only system we can ever have. Yet for many, something nags at us about such a claim. Could this really be the only option? We’re told we shouldn’t even think about such things. But we can’t help thinking — is this really the “end of history,” in the sense that big thinkers have used that phrase to signal the final victory of global capitalism? If this is the end of history in that sense, we wonder, can the actual end of the planet far behind?

We wonder, we fret, and these thoughts nag at us — for good reason. Capitalism — or, more accurately, the predatory corporate capitalism that defines and dominates our lives — will be our death if we don’t escape it. Crucial to progressive politics is finding the language to articulate that reality, not in outdated dogma that alienates but in plain language that resonates with people. We should be searching for ways to explain to co-workers in water-cooler conversations — radical politics in five minutes or less — why we must abandon predatory corporate capitalism. If we don’t, we may well be facing the end times, and such an end will bring rupture not rapture.

Here’s my shot at the language for this argument.

Capitalism is admittedly an incredibly productive system that has created a flood of goods unlike anything the world has ever seen. It also is a system that is fundamentally (1) inhuman, (2) anti-democratic, and (3) unsustainable. Capitalism has given those of us in the First World lots of stuff (most of it of marginal or questionable value) in exchange for our souls, our hope for progressive politics, and the possibility of a decent future for children.

In short, either we change or we die — spiritually, politically, literally.

1. Capitalism is inhuman

There is a theory behind contemporary capitalism. We’re told that because we are greedy, self-interested animals, an economic system must reward greedy, self-interested behavior if we are to thrive economically.

04/28/07 “ICH” — — The following is a transcript of the Democratic Radio Address delivered by Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.) on Saturday April 28, 2007:

“Good morning, this is Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army, retired.

“I am not now nor have I ever been a Democrat or a Republican. Thus, I do not speak for the Democratic Party. I speak for myself, as a non-partisan retired military officer who is a former Director of the National Security Agency. I do so because Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, asked me.

“In principle, I do not favor Congressional involvement in the execution of U.S. foreign and military policy. I have seen its perverse effects in many cases. The conflict in Iraq is different. Over the past couple of years, the President has let it proceed on automatic pilot, making no corrections in the face of accumulating evidence that his strategy is failing and cannot be rescued.

“Thus, he lets the United States fly further and further into trouble, squandering its influence, money, and blood, facilitating the gains of our enemies. The Congress is the only mechanism we have to fill this vacuum in command judgment.

“To put this in a simple army metaphor, the Commander-in-Chief seems to have gone AWOL, that is ‘absent without leave.’ He neither acts nor talks as though he is in charge. Rather, he engages in tit-for-tat games.

“Some in Congress on both sides of the aisle have responded with their own tits-for-tats. These kinds of games, however, are no longer helpful, much less amusing. They merely reflect the absence of effective leadership in a crisis. And we are in a crisis.

“Most Americans suspect that something is fundamentally wrong with the President’s management of the conflict in Iraq. And they are right.

“The challenge we face today is not how to win in Iraq; it is how to recover from a strategic mistake: invading Iraq in the first place. The war could never have served American interests.

“But it has served Iran’s interest by revenging Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in the 1980s and enhancing Iran’s influence within Iraq. It has also served al Qaeda’s interests, providing a much better training ground than did Afghanistan, allowing it to build its ranks far above the levels and competence that otherwise would have been possible.

“We cannot ‘win’ a war that serves our enemies interests and not our own. Thus continuing to pursue the illusion of victory in Iraq makes no sense. We can now see that it never did.

“A wise commander in this situation normally revises his objectives and changes his strategy, not just marginally, but radically. Nothing less today will limit the death and destruction that the invasion of Iraq has unleashed.

“No effective new strategy can be devised for the United States until it begins withdrawing its forces from Iraq. Only that step will break the paralysis that now confronts us. Withdrawal is the pre-condition for winning support from countries in Europe that have stood aside and other major powers including India, China, Japan, Russia.

“It will also shock and change attitudes in Iran, Syria, and other countries on Iraq’s borders, making them far more likely to take seriously new U.S. approaches, not just to Iraq, but to restoring regional stability and heading off the spreading chaos that our war has caused.

“The bill that Congress approved this week, with bipartisan support, setting schedules for withdrawal, provides the President an opportunity to begin this kind of strategic shift, one that defines regional stability as the measure of victory, not some impossible outcome.

“I hope the President seizes this moment for a basic change in course and signs the bill the Congress has sent him. I will respect him greatly for such a rare act of courage, and so too, I suspect, will most Americans.

“This is retired General Odom. Thank you for listening.”

Smithfield Packing is a glaring example of how capitalism creates all kinds of victims of oppression, who when they take a broader view, can push the strategic weak point of the system and open a way for many others to win a victory.

Smithfield has spawned three different movements: one demanding the right of workers to organize a union and to collectively bargain with the company; another resisting environmental poisoning, and a third composed of immigrant workers and their allies fighting repression based on their nationality status.

Smithfield Packing is the second largest meat packing company in the U.S. and runs the world’s largest pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C. Smithfield workers, primarily Latin and African-American, butcher and pack 176,000 hogs per week under harsh health and safety working conditions. These workers have been fighting to establish a trade union for 14 years.

The company has increased its level of viciousness to fend off workers’ efforts. It has played Mexican and Black workers against each other, women workers against men and young versus old. It has attempted to intimidate Latin workers by threatening to have the government deport them.

Dirt, danger and discrimination

While unionized in most locations outside of North Carolina, in this southern state Smithfield has fought vigorously to prevent its employees from forming a union. Elections to unionize the plant held in 1994 and in 1997 were initially lost. But a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) judge made a landmark decision overturning the results. The decision charged Smithfield with multiple violations of federal labor law, violations that destroyed the conditions for a free and fair election.

Since the plant opened, Smithfield workers have fought for the right to organize a union and to collectively bargain in the face of criminal and sometimes violent repression by the company, at times with the state’s collusion.

In addition to the challenges to organizing any union in the U.S. South, especially with a very multinational workforce of mostly African-American and Latin@ workers, workers have faced spies, deportation and plant-closing threats, false arrests, police attacks and racist hate speech.

In 2006, after having been found guilty of a long list of illegal anti-union policies in the previous union election, Smithfield is now calling for a new election. Having experienced the threats, illegal firings and physical attacks at the previous election, workers are instead demanding full recognition of the union immediately.

As one worker, Ronnie Simmons, put it: “If the company held another election, they would just intimidate and violate our rights again and then we’d have to wait another ten years for it to wind its way through the courts. We need help now and we need our voices to be heard and respected now. We’ve been fighting for far too long. Our workers want a union now. It’s long overdue.”

The Employee Free Choice Act, which the U.S. Senate will debate next week, would allow all workers to form a union without having to be subjected to undemocratic elections where, like at Smithfield, workers are subject to attack and harassment by management. Some senators have threatened to filibuster to prevent a vote, and Bush has promised a veto.

To force the company to recognize the union, workers are building a more permanent movement rather than following traditional union strategies. Workers are simultaneously building community and political pressure on the company, while fighting for winnable gains inside the plant.

“Help us and ask questions,” read the note, secretly passed to a visitor from an immigrant child incarcerated in a Texas prison.

Based on their visits and interviews, the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service are calling for the immediate shutdown of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas.

Local activists have brought national and international attention on this facility, owned by the Corrections Corporation of American (CCA), which imprisons children and their families for profit under the same horrendous conditions as when it was a prison for adults.

War profiteer. It used to be one of the dirtiest slurs in American politics, potent enough to sully the reputations of the rich and powerful. Now it’s a calling card, something you might find highlighted in a defense contractor’s corporate prospectus as a lure to attract investors looking for bulging profits and escalating dividends.

In the summer of 2000, the defense industry was mired in a prolonged slump, as was the US economy, which under the unforgiving lash of its neo-liberal architects had become dependent on the financial engines of the munitions makers. Unhappily for the defense industry and its investor class, the Soviet Union had disintegrated before their very eyes and the People’s Republic of China, long considered the bogeyman state in waiting, had lustily embraced state capitalism instead of stepping up to the plate as a brawny military rival.

The big ticket items of the Cold War, from Stealth bombers to nuclear subs, from aircraft carriers to the Star Wars scheme, that had sustained the industry to the tune of tens of billions every year no longer had the slightest pretext for continued production, except as the most extravagant form of corporate welfare. Those weapons systems that weren’t obsolete, such as the B-2 bomber and F-22 fighter, simply didn’t work, such as Star Wars-lately remarketed as Ballistic Missile Defense.

To make matters more fraught for the weapons industry, the Pentagon was poised to put the finishing touches on its Quadrennial Defense Review, which sets procurement, budget and policy goals for the Defense Department. Of course, the Pentagon would never slash its own budget and, in fact, many anticipated that the QDR would call for increasing annual defense spending to something approaching 4 percent of the gross domestic product. However, it seemed likely that the generals would call for the termination of many of the multi-billion dollar relics of the Cold War in exchange for massive increases in spending on newer killing technologies geared for what has come to be known as “4th Generation Warfare.”

Then 9/11 happened and all the anxieties of the weapons lobby evaporated in the flames of one fateful morning. The QDR, once so threatening, was simply another fat white paper that came and went without leaving so much as a scratch on the old Imperial Guard.

As we revealed here in CounterPunch, the Taliban offered Osama Bin Laden, and his top associates, the Bush administration on several occasions after the attacks of 9/11. Bush refused. They wanted a prolonged and ever-escalating war, not a deftly executed police action and not justice for the families of those slain and maimed by Bin Laden’s kamikazes.

Instead, thousands of Cruise missiles were ordered up and, just like that, Boeing and Lockheed were back in business. For months, cruise missiles, J-DAM bombs and CB-87 cluster munitions shredded the hamlets and hovels of Afghanistan, killing more than 3,500 civilians in the early days of that one-sided war. But this was simply a bloody prelude to a more profound slaughter. For Afghanistan, in the immortal words of Donald Rumsfeld, wasn’t a “target rich” environment. But Iraq certainly was. And only hours after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld and his neocon coterie of laptop bombardiers began plotting the war on Saddam and the domestic propaganda campaign for how to sell it to a psychologically shattered and anxiety-ridden American public. The civilian body count in Iraq would climb much higher, topping 650,000 by the winter of 2007, with more than 200 Iraqis dying every day.

The Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq were misguided, counter-productive and illegal ventures, although entirely predictable outbursts of imperial vengeance. What is truly perverse is the fact that while one wing of the Pentagon was planning wars against a “faceless enemy” and a “rogue state”, another wing was lobbying congress on behalf of the weapons companies to approve tens of billions in funding for all of the baroque artifacts of the Cold War, from Star Wars to Stealth fighters. Congress was only too happy to help. From the fall of 2001 through the end of 2002, not a single funding request for a big-ticket item went denied, from unneeded aircraft carriers to unwanted Boeing tankers.

But in order to fund these bailouts to the defense lobby for making weapons for a war that no longer existed, Congress had to rob other budgetary accounts. And here’s where it gets truly bizarre. Intent on satiating the cravings for pork from their political patrons, the leadership of the Defense Appropriations committees, chaired until 2007 by Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican, paid for these costly and useless projects by reprogramming billions from the so-called Operations and Maintenance accounts, which were being used to fund the logistics work for the on-the-ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the normally docile Office of Management and Budget raised a warning, writing in a letter to Stevens dated December 6, 2002: “These [Operations and Maintenance] reductions would undermine DoD’s ability to adequately fund training, operations, maintenance, supplies and other essentials. They would seriously damage the readiness of our armed forces and undermine their ability to execute current operations, including the war on terrorism.”

That warning letter (and thousands of documents like it), ignored by the war-hungry US press, is the congressional equivalent of the Pentagon Papers for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In order to shell out billions for Star Wars and the F-22 fighter, Congress took money from accounts that would have improved the terrible logistical planning in Iraq and bought essential items for the protection of US combat troops, such as body armor and armored Humvees. The blood of many a soldier maimed or killed in Iraq is indelibly stained on the hands of Stevens and his colleagues who choose to put the welfare of Boeing and Lockheed above the grunts in the field.

“Preservation, justification, and expansion of the military–industrial colossus, especially of the armaments industry and other Pentagon contractors, have become critical big business objectives in themselves.”

How Escalation of War and Military Spending Are Used as Disguised or Roundabout Ways to Reverse the New Deal and Redistribute National Resources in Favor of the Wealthy

Critics of the recent U.S. wars of choice have long argued that they are all about oil. “No Blood for Oil” has been a rallying cry for most of the opponents of the war.

It can be demonstrated, however, that there is another (less obvious but perhaps more critical) factor behind the recent rise of U.S. military aggressions abroad: war profiteering by the Pentagon contractors. Frequently invoking dubious “threats to our national security and/or interests,” these beneficiaries of war dividends, the military–industrial complex and related businesses whose interests are vested in the Pentagon’s appropriation of public money, have successfully used war and military spending to justify their lion’s share of tax dollars and to disguise their strategy of redistributing national income in their favor.

This cynical strategy of disguised redistribution of national resources from the bottom to the top is carried out by a combination of (a) drastic hikes in the Pentagon budget, and (b) equally drastic tax cuts for the wealthy. As this combination creates large budget deficits, it then forces cuts in non-military public spending as a way to fill the gaps that are thus created. As a result, the rich are growing considerably richer at the expense of middle– and low–income classes.

Despite its critical importance, most opponents of war seem to have given short shrift to the crucial role of the Pentagon budget and its contractors as major sources of war and militarism—a phenomenon that the late President Eisenhower warned against nearly half a century ago. Perhaps a major reason for this oversight is that critics of war and militarism tend to view the U.S. military force as primarily a means for imperialist gains—oil or otherwise.

The fact is, however, that as the U.S. military establishment has grown in size, it has also evolved in quality and character: it is no longer simply a means but, perhaps more importantly, an end in itself—an imperial force in its own right. Accordingly, the rising militarization of U.S. foreign policy in recent years is driven not so much by some general/abstract national interests as it is by the powerful special interests that are vested in the military capital, that is, war industries and war–related businesses.

The Magnitude of U.S. Military Spending

Even without the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are fast surpassing half a trillion dollars, U.S. military spending is now the largest item in the federal budget. Officially, it is the second highest item after Social Security payments. But Social Security is a self-financing trust fund. So, in reality, military spending is the highest budget item.

The Pentagon budget for the current fiscal year (2007) is about $456 billion. President Bush’s proposed increase of 10% for next year will raise this figure to over half a trillion dollars, that is, $501.6 billion for fiscal year 2008. A proposed supplemental appropriation to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq “brings proposed military spending for FY 2008 to $647.2 billion, the highest level of military spending since the end of World War II—higher than Vietnam, higher than Korea, higher than the peak of the Reagan buildup.” [1]

Using official budget figures, William D. Hartung, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York, provides a number of helpful comparisons:

• Proposed U.S. military spending for FY 2008 is larger than military spending by all of the other nations in the world combined.

• At $141.7 billion, this year’s proposed spending on the Iraq war is larger than the military budgets of China and Russia combined. Total U.S. military spending for FY2008 is roughly ten times the military budget of the second largest military spending country in the world, China.

• Proposed U.S. military spending is larger than the combined gross domestic products (GDP) of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

• The FY 2008 military budget proposal is more than 30 times higher than all spending on State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined.

• The FY 2008 military budget is over 120 times higher than the roughly $5 billion per year the U.S. government spends on combating global warming.

• The FY 2008 military spending represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs: education, health, housing assistance, international affairs, natural resources and environment, justice, veterans’ benefits, science and space, transportation, training/employment and social services, economic development, and several more items. [2]

Although the official military budget already eats up the lion’s share of the public money (crowding out vital domestic needs), it nonetheless grossly understates the true magnitude of military spending. The real national defense budget, according to Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, is nearly twice as much as the official budget. The reason for this understatement is that the official Department of Defense budget excludes not only the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a number of other major cost items. [3]

These disguised cost items include budgets for the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security; nuclear weapons research and development, testing, and storage (placed in the Energy budget); veterans programs (in the Veteran’s Administration budget); most military retiree payments (in the Treasury budget); foreign military aid in the form of weapons grants for allies (in the State Department budget); interest payments on money borrowed to fund military programs in past years (in the Treasury budget); sales and property taxes at military bases (in local government budgets); and the hidden expenses of tax-free food, housing, and combat pay allowances.

President Bush recently said that “there’s a lot of differences” between the current war in Iraq and the Vietnam War.

As fighting in Iraq enters its fifth year, an increasing number of experts in foreign policy and national strategy are arguing that the biggest difference may be that the Iraq war will inflict greater damage to U.S. interests than Vietnam did.

“In terms of the consequences of failure, the stakes are much bigger than Vietnam,” said former defense secretary William S. Cohen. “The geopolitical consequences are . . . potentially global in scope.”

About 17 times as many U.S. troops died in the Vietnam War — the longest war in U.S. history — as have been lost in Iraq, the nation’s third-longest war. Also, despite widespread public dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, the debate over it has not convulsed American society to the extent seen during the Vietnam conflict. However, Vietnam does not have oil and is not in the middle of a region crucial to the global economy and festering with terrorism, experts say, leading many of them to conclude that the long-term effects of the Iraq war will be worse for the United States.

“It makes Vietnam look like a cakewalk,” said retired Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald, a veteran of the Vietnam War. The domino theory that nations across Southeast Asia would go communist was not fulfilled, he noted, but with Iraq, “worst-case scenarios are the most likely thing to happen.”

Iraq is worse than Vietnam “in so many ways,” agreed Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a retired Army officer and author of one of the most respected studies of the U.S. military’s failure in Vietnam. “We knew what we were getting into in Vietnam. We didn’t here.”

Also, President Richard M. Nixon used diplomacy with China and the Soviet Union to exploit the split between them and so minimize the fallout of Vietnam. By contrast, Krepinevich said, the Bush administration has “magnified” the problems of Iraq by neglecting public diplomacy in the Muslim world and by not developing an energy policy to reduce the significance of Middle Eastern oil.

In strategic terms, the Vietnam conflict was understood even by many of its opponents as part of a global stance of containment, a policy that preceded the war and endured for 15 years after Saigon fell, noted retired Army Col. Richard H. Sinnreich, a veteran of two Vietnam tours of duty. “I’m not sure we can count on a similarly prompt strategic recovery this time around,” he continued. “Bush’s preemption strategy was controversial even before Iraq, and the war itself has been so badly mismanaged that even our allies doubt our competence.”

Gary Solis, who fought as a Marine in Vietnam and more recently taught the law of war at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said he is hearing more such discussions. “Most of my military acquaintances agree that the issues in our departure from Vietnam will pale beside those that will be presented by an Iraq withdrawal,” Solis said.

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program.

But the officials said the initial findings raised serious new concerns about the effort.

The reconstruction effort was originally designed as nearly equal to the military push to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish, and promote good will toward the United States.

“These first inspections indicate that the concerns that we and others have had about the Iraqis sustaining our investments in these projects are valid,” Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads the office of the special inspector general, said in an interview on Friday.