These days there's pretty much a scandal for everyone. Between Abramoff, Plame, Delay, Duke Cunningham, Katrina response, Cronyism, PreWar Intel, Torture, Domestic Spying, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Ahmad Chalabi, Judith Miller, etc. there's pretty much something available for everyone. There's so many, it's impossible to be an expert on all of them. I know...I've tried. I really tried to be an expert on the potential connection of the Italian Secret Service in the Yellowcake Scandal. It was too deep and I had to cut bait.
Now, I think it's an unreported scandal that we're making the poor pay for Katrina relief through health-care cuts, student loan cuts, food stamp cuts etc. rather than the Marshall Plan we were promised. But I think I've found a bigger scandal that everyone can agree on. What's a scandal is how severely the administration underestimated the cost of the war and the legacy this underestimation will leave. Recent reports conservatively estimate the long term cost of the war at TWO TRILLION DOLLARS...compared with what we were hearing from Bush's economic team before the war:
Before the invasion, then-White House budget director Mitch Daniels predicted Iraq would be "an affordable endeavor" and rejected an estimate by then-White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey of total Iraq war costs at $100 billion to $200 billion as "very, very high."
So if $100 billion is "very high," what were they expecting? $50 million? Meaning that they could have underestimated by a factor of 40? That's got to be the scandal of the century. As a project manager, what if I took a million dollar project and brought it in for $40 million? Was the Big Dig even that bad a failure?
These are, of course, costs one can calculate..."hard costs" if you will. I'd like to see the price of lost respect in the world due to the hubristic bullying, lying, and manipulation. How much "goodwill" came off our balance sheet after no WMD, Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo.
Now I think Colin Powell was right with his "Pottery Barn" rule that if you break it, you own it (although I think it proves Powell doesn't know what the hell they sell at Pottery Barn). Bush screwed it up, but now our entire country has to fix it. The false choice of "stay the course" versus "cut and run" is rhetorically fallacious in the highest. We can't have an immediate withdrawal as we must pay Bush's butcher's bill and hopefully leave the place somewhat functional.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
16 comments:
Hmmmmmm.......EVERYTHING was miscalculated, so the costs certainly were too. And I do NOT want to defend it, but I would point out that we were nowhere near alone on the WMD thing. Clinton had talked about it, as did numerous other countries. After cutting the CIA budget for 20 straight years, starting with George the first and accelerating under Clinton. By the time W took over, there was only ONE Arabic speaking spy in our whole system. Were we rushed into it? yes. Was a war defensible with Iraq? Yes, in my opinion, but not because of WMD-because of flagrant flogging of the UN, genocide and terrorist harboring. Does W know what he is doing? Probably not. Would I still vote for him over Gore and Kerry? Absofuckinglutely.
And while I am at it. I couldn't give a fuck about global goodwill. Not one country in the world has been a better neighbor than the US. What does it get us? Global derision. Look at KYOTO. The US who regularly shows up as the second or third cleanest country in the world, gets attacked by EVERYONE.
When we are attacked on our own soil, what we get from the very people we have bailed out on numerous occasions, is that maybe we deserved it.
FUCK THEM.
In the first post you lean on the fact that other countries also believed there was WMD. Then in the second post you say the rest of the world can go to hell. Firstly the rest of the world didn't solidly agree. All the weapon's inspectors and the IAEA certainly didn't agree that there was WMD. When the rest of the world did agree, frequently it was because of US intelligence, or in the case of the Yellowcake in Niger disaster, many other countries (like England and Italy) bought into the same doctored documents.
I believe the US to be the greatest country in the world and therefore hold her to a higher standard. There's plenty of evidence that evidence contrary to the administration's position was ignored in favor of supporting evidence. I believe the US should be smarter than that...and not just say that other countries believed it too so we're off the hook.
I'm no apologist for the Clinton administration and agree forcefully that they're culpable as well. But because they did something stupid because they were sidetracked trying to keep Bill out of jail is not an excuse either. Bottom line...don't do dumb shit when you have reason to know better. Listen to smart people. Don't use national disasters for political gain (like they most certainly did in the 2002 election and the run up to Iraq.)
As for who you would vote for...I'm wondering what are your most important issues that influence your vote? I may be presumptuous in thinking it's not foreign policy but economic policy. Am I wrong? Would you vote for someone who didn't agree with your view of proper economic policy?
Very good question. The answer is no, you aren't wrong. Here's why: Economic policy drives everything and determines poverty levels more than anything else. Those who believe that economic wonks are insensitive to to the needs of the poor and/or underpriviledged don't get it at all. The argument should center around results, not on feel-good policies that result in skyrocketing dependency programs and DO NOT lower poverty rates. The stats back me up, here and globally. Von Mises, the Austrian economist predicted with perfect accuracy what would happen here under a welfare state, down to the exact number of children welfare moms would spit out. Clinton, thankfully, started the reversal of these policies, after the American people spoke loudly against his and Hiller-witches' policies in '94.
Where it gets vague and more subjective is how economic policy is driven by trade/world affairs. This is another reason why I believe the Iraq war is not all bad. I am not alone here, Christopher Hitchens and Ted Koppel, LIBERALS, agree. Like it or not, oil lubricates and makes our economy possible, which means more jobs, and less poor. Having so much in the hands of a murderous, loose cannon, who would tolerate if not outright support terrorism, makes a real unstable situation. Should we have waited? Yes, in my opinion, look at going in AFTER Afghanistan is done. BUT, it's not like we had a lot of precedent to rely on, Had Clinton nabbed Bin Laden when he could have, it could have all been averted, and I am not blaming this all on him either. Those FUCKING IDIOTS blaming 9/11 on Bush policy forget about the FIRST WTC bombing and the USS Cole as well. It's laughable.
I was fine with Clinton after he got whupped in '94 and shifted to the right. A centrist pres with a conservative congress is just dandy with me. BUT, I believe in a strong intelligence presence and military might, and the aftermath of Reagan no doubt had huge economic dividends at the closure of the cold war. Don't get me started on the crapital gains tax, the stupidest tax in the history of mankind. It does more to job prevention than even other stupid laws like the minimum wage.
I also believe the Republicans have totally blown it, just like they did under Reagan, by not being more fiscally conservative. I disagree that war costs can be projected, but FUCK, have SOME discipline. Too much power in the hands of either party is of course, absolute power, which corrupts absolutely.
Still, I think we would be worse off with any semblance of liberalism in a power position. I am somewhere between Republican and Libretarian, but I hate them all and don't want to align with any of them.
Is "Libretarian" some kind of French party? Just kidding.
I agree with some of that, disagree with less, and I'm not smart enough to have an opinion on the rest.
The only part of Liberalism that I want is for the government to stay the fuck out of my business...especially the religious types.
You mention that it gets vague is where economic policy is driven by world affairs. Aren't there also world affairs driven by our economic policy? Especially with respect to China. I just read an article about how they're going to stop buying dollars to the degree they have been ($15B/month). We have a big deficit that must be funded by overseas interests and this puts us over a barrel as far as what we can do in the world.
So back to something from the other day...we now have a super-crackpot in Iran who is a far greater supporter of terrorism than Saddam ever was. He's sitting on a goldmine of crude and will have to be dealt with one way or the other. Do we need to budget another two or three trillion to topple them? Or can we legitimately start looking at other forms of energy as a geopolitical strategic necessity? Or do you contend that we're so closely married to petrol that we can't bite the bullet?
And I especially agree on the demise of fiscal conservatism. The Rep congress has taken earmarks through the ceiling. I think there were like 15,000 earmarks in the last budget compared to like 2000 at the beginning of Bush's term. Disgraceful...yet Delay comes out and says he's cut all the fat out of the budget. True conservatives would run him out of town on a rail.
Iran's guy ....crackpot, agreed. Regarding getting off oil. Easier said than done. Look at Kuntsler's book that examined all the "promising" solutions. None are near readiness. It's not simply a matter of committing dollars. Nuclear power may end up being the best option.
I'm a big supporter of nuclear, but it doesn't really address the area where we have the problem...automobiles. We can use non-middle east sources for much of our electricity generation (coal, hydro, wind, nuclear, etc.) I don't see what's wrong with starting with incentives for building more fuel efficient cars (CAFE standards) that were poo-pooed on last year's energy bill.
I've heard all the arguments about why we're a good distance away from real alternative energy sources - but that's no excuse for not doing anything. We're a smart country and we should accelerate science funding for all programs. Put it into the Defense Bill because this is really a national security issue.
I don't disagree, but CAFE standards are a drop in the bucket. We have raised them over the years and it is not enough to stem the global demand for oil. Fuel Cells are years away even with more funding and they apparantly can't corall methane or ethanol in a cost efficient way. I do agree that incentives and spending should be increased.
More on the Iran guy...he hasn't violated all of the UN standards that Saddam did, nor has he committed genocide on his own people. Still he is a threat and apparantly the UN thinks so too.
What about Krazy Korea Kim? I don't know if starving your own population to death meets Webster's definition of genocide, but I can think of much better ways to die. And he's certainly been plenty crosswise with the U.N. I understand that the millions of troops on the 38th parallel makes an invasion mighty inconvenient to a lot of South Koreans, but according to your logic in the previous post, it meets the Iraqi threshold pretty well (except that the WMD are probably real).
We marched into Iraq expecting our soldiers to be hit with battlefield WMD and expecting Saddam to launch WMD loaded Scuds at Israel (and according to our goutish VP, maybe reconstituted nuclear weapons.) If we were willing to take that risk then, why not now with North Korea? Do you think it might be because they really knew Iraq didn't have WMD and it was just a convenient way to sell the war?
Let me get this straight, you think that since we went after Iraq, we are then hypocrites by not going after Iran and North Korea? I think not. Kim is a crackpot, yes, but he appears to be all bark and no bite. Secondly, he has not clearly broken exact UN resolutions like Saddam did. Thirdly, running a starving country isn't genocide, or we'd have to go to Cuba too. And all of Africa. That being said, our liberals and half of europe want to classify Bush as the threat. SOMEBODY convince me he is a threat as opposed to these two nuts. Harry Belafonte and Sean Penn should be embarassed for their uneducated, self-important selves. Furthermore, again, the oil is in our national interests, and letting that region implode or explode would have dire coinsequences for our economy. These same town criers, yelling "Greed! Oil!" would have been the first ones to whine about no jobs and layoffs, see Michael Moore, perhaps the most misguided, lying, hypocritical bastard living.
Now you are putting me in the position of defending the invasion, which I have mixed emotions about. I think though, that it's too simple and knee-jerk(as perhaps was this war), to monday morning quarterback a very unique and unprecedented set of circumstances, which again, were fueled by the stripping of our intelligence department over 12 years.
No, I don't think we're being hypocrites by not going into N. Korea. That, however, is what you appeared to be suggesting when you said about the new Iranian president: "he hasn't violated all of the UN standards that Saddam did, nor has he committed genocide on his own people." This seems to suggest that when those two things happen, preemptive invasion is legitimate. The insinuation in your post is that when he crosses the threshold set for the Iraq war, we can consider the same thing. My own feeling is that the Iraq threshold should serve as an object lesson in what not to do.
I guess I have to agree with liberals and half of Europe and agree that Bush is a threat. I say this not because he's a warmonger, but because of his track record as a poor decision maker and political manipulator. I don't see how reasonable people can trust him after just about everything he has done regarding foreign policy has turned out to be wrong. I value intelligence and sound decision-making. When people do stupid things and put politics ahead of our self-interest, I consider that a threat.
No no no no no. I wasn't suggesting these were litmus tests. I was pointing out differences. IF ANY country started violating numerous UN mandates and possibly posed a global threat, particularly two that had nukes, you would have to consider that one of your options may be using force, would you not?
Can't agree with you at all on Bush, yes he made bad decisions on Iraq, so did Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs and Viet Nam, ditto Johnson and Nixon. Carter and Reagan. ALL made military mistakes and I do not consider any of them global threats nor do I Bush.
From Christopher Hitchens, no Bush apologist:
But a whole school of pseudo-empiricism is now springing up, concerning the "evidence" from Iraq. In Slate a few weeks ago, reviewing the new book by Saddam's one-time chief physicist Mahdi Obeidi, I pointed to some important facts about Iraq's weaponry that have only become known to us as a direct consequence of regime-change. Some of these things—the buried nuclear centrifuge, or the attempt to purchase missiles from North Korea—were rather worse than had been previously alleged by the administration. Moreover, nobody before the war had claimed that Iraq had no covert weaponry at all. (To the contrary, I used to have to argue every day with antiwar forces who said that Saddam would be able to liquidate tens of thousands of coalition troops, not to mention many Israelis, with his mighty arsenal.)
Continue Article
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A comparable elision is now under way in the matter of "terrorism." In that Saddam Hussein will not have to stand trial for direct complicity in the crimes of 11 September 2001, it is now being freely said that he was not really a friend of jihadist fanaticism at all. The two cases in point are Abdul Rahman Yasin, a crucial member of the team that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, currently the leader of a very deadly and ruthless group known as Monotheism and Jihad, operating in central Iraq. (Mr. Zarqawi is evidently a "hands-on" kind of a guy: He is believed to be, and has claimed to be, the wielder of the murderer's knife in more than one decapitation-porn video.)
The latter is one respect, at least, in which he differs from Osama Bin Laden. Like many a crazed Islamist, Bin Laden prefers to lead from the rear and to send others to die. Even if he is still alive—which seems open to great doubt—he only escaped by running away from the capital city of the Afghanistan he had helped oppress and enslave. Not for him the baring of the chest to the Crusader-Zionist bullets. In every other important resemblance, however, Zarqawi is a Bin Laden clone. He has the same theology, of contempt for Shia Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews, and secularists. He was in the next camp over in Afghanistan. He has been convincingly accused by the Jordanian police—he is of Jordanian nationality—of trying to get hold of chemical and biological weapons.
Ah, but is he really a certified al-Qaida man? Well, he has made professions of fealty to Osama. And a Zarqawi messenger and known associate was intercepted some time ago leaving Iraq with a message for the boss about creating a new front in Iraq against all heretics and unbelievers (with special emphasis on starting a Shia-Sunni civil war). If you asked me, I would say that Zarqawi was at the very least a Bin Laden wannabe, and at the very most a rival for the possibly vacant position of most lethal Islamist killer in the world. (Ah, but I didn't prove that he was actually in Bin Laden's inner circle.)
An equally interesting question is Zarqawi's connection to the Baathist underworld. It is known that he was in Iraq before the invasion, though our intelligence is so bad (yet again) that we don't know if this was for medical treatment or not, or even whether he had lost part of a limb in or around Tora Bora. His main pre-war activity was directed at the Kurdish leadership in that part of northern Iraq that was outside Saddam Hussein's immediate control. It is evident that he can penetrate very well-guarded parts of Baghdad and other major cities, that he has more than one safe-house, and that he disposes of a huge amount of money. His network, of local and foreign recruits, is taken very seriously by all observers.
In order to believe that Zarqawi is or was innocent of al-Qaida and Baathist ties, therefore, or in order to believe that he does not in fact represent such a tie, you must be ready to believe that:
1) A low-level Iraqi official decided to admit a much-hunted Jordanian—a refugee from the invasion of Afghanistan, after Sept. 11, 2001—when even the most conservative forces in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were keeping their distance from such people and even assisting in rounding them up.
2) That this newly admitted immigrant felt that the most pressing need of the holy war was the assassination of Kurdish leaders opposed to the rule of Saddam Hussein.
3) That a recently arrived Jordanian, in a totally controlled police state, was so enterprising as to swiftly put himself in possession of maps, city diagrams, large sums of cash, and a group of heavily armed fighters hitherto named after the Iraqi dictator—the Fedayeen Saddam.
I can only say that you are quite welcome to believe all of that if you wish. But you must be able to wish quite hard. The same is true of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who was at least an Iraqi passport-holder when he skipped bail from New Jersey in 1993 as one of the most wanted men in the United States and made it through Jordan to Baghdad in a matter of hours. Peter Boyer in The New Yorker of Nov. 1 is the latest to see nothing especially odd in this. (Boyer does concede, as the New York Times did once report, that Saddam may have hoped to use Yasin as a "bargaining chip." Indeed. And to bargain about what? My friend Rolf Ekeus, the eminent Swedish diplomat who originally founded the UNSCOM inspectorate, told me that Tariq Aziz, Saddam's slimy foreign minister, once asked him to act as intermediary. In return for an easing of sanctions, said Aziz, Iraq had a lot of information about the whereabouts of terrorists that it was willing to trade …)
Millions of Iraqis can tell you that during the Saddam despotism their country was as hard to enter as it was to leave. Any reporter with average knowledge or experience can also tell you that decisions of this kind—about which high-value fugitive to admit, for example—were not taken at consular or desk-officer level during the days of the supreme and absolute leader. But of course, this is no smoking gun. Perhaps, indeed, the Baathists and the jihadists simply collaborate without having to be told. Meanwhile, what are all those other bodies doing in the river?
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is forthcom
While I was talking about Military mistakes, I no doubt should have included Somalia. Clinton is on the list too.
Post a Comment