Logically Speaking, the War on Women Must Be a War Without End

I think I've narrowed down the reason for the War on Women -- this whole childbirth thing freaks conservatives right out. Watching the video above, I can't come up with a better explanation. In it, Republican consultant Alex Castellanos denies that women are paid less than men, despite the plain, indisputable fact that they are. As always, Republicans hate math and math hates them right back.

But Castellanos backs up his assertion with creative accounting -- women run off and do crazy things like have babies, so if you count that time off, the pay gap disappears. Therefore, women should take the hit for their frivolous hobby of, you know, perpetuating the human race. You don't see men running off and having babies. Because men are serious and grown up.

This is all about as silly as it gets and it demonstrates how weak the conservative arguments are in defense (and denial) of their War on Women. But consider this argument in relation to the other fronts in the war -- abortion and contraception. In Conservative World, women should be punished by law for avoiding childbirth and punished economically for engaging in it. Republicans are busy reinforcing a no-win situation for women, where both pregnancy at its avoidance have negative -- but in their minds, completely justified -- consequences. We've already established that women who use birth control are sluts. The less said about women who seek abortions the better. And women who get pregnant are bad workers. I guess the logical conclusion to all this is that women are just naturally bad people.

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Private Contractors Failing Just as Spectacularly in Afghanistan

Let's talk about how superior the private sector is to the public sector for a bit. We're going to hear a lot from Republicans about how government is evil and corrupt and incompetent, and how the private sector is the only entity that can really get things done -- and does it cheaper. The first problem here is that the math doesn't work at all. Let's say a project will cost X when all is said and done. You look at materials, labor, equipment you may need, gas, etc. and that's what you wind up with. A private contractor would need X + profit to get the job done. Government can do it for X, because it doesn't have to turn a profit. Last time I checked, X + anything is more than just X, so the idea that a private company can do the same thing for less doesn't really pan out, arithmetically. The only way you can pull this off is to subtract from X -- and that means skimping on something somewhere and winding up with a cheap piece of crap. Doubt it? Then explain why military personnel were being electrocuted in showers in Iraq or why they were served rotten meat.

In 2006, Business Week reported, "The losses to fraud and waste in Iraq are almost certainly in the billions, current and former government officials agree. The Special IG for Iraq Reconstruction says it has more than 80 open investigations and has referred 20 more cases to the Justice Dept. for prosecution. A spokesman for the criminal investigative arm of the Defense Dept. says that office expects a 'rise in referrals of potential fraud or corruption cases' because of the recent deployment to Iraq of additional Pentagon investigators and FBI agents."

Billions in waste and fraud, often covered by unfinished and unusable projects, doesn't really strike me as big savings. It strikes me as waste and fraud. The military used to do a lot of this stuff themselves -- do we really need to outsource mess halls and laundry duty, for example? -- but now it has, for reasons nobody seems to be very good at explaining, become completely impossible. The military can fire a long range missile straight down the chimney of some terrorist hide out with pin-point accuracy, but they couldn't possibly cook a damned hamburger.

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A War that Broke Two Nations

The war in Iraq is over -- except that it's not. Last night, the last combat troops rolled out of Iraq, entering Kuwait on their way home. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has come to a close, even if our presence in the country is ongoing and active. "The remaining 50,000 troops are viewed as trainers and logistics support to the Iraqi government," writes Juan Cole. "But they include special operations units, helicopter gunship crews, and other war fighters who are still going to be engaged in combat but will not be categorized as being in Iraq for that purpose. Iraq has no air force to speak of, and the US will be providing the air support until at least 2018." This time, no one's being stupid about it; no "Mission Accomplished" banners hang anywhere, there are no "WAR OVER!" headlines in newspapers or crawling along on cable under the chins of talking heads. It's just a quiet, orderly, incomplete withdrawal from a nation we had no business occupying in the first place. Cole writes of the "true significance of Thursday's last convoy":

...It is a symbol of a turnaround in US policy, a repudiation of the Bush administration doctrine of preemptive war. "Preemptive war" is a euphemism for the rehabilitation of aggressive war, which the world community attempted to abolish in the United Nations charter. While many blame Obama for escalating the Afghanistan War, that war at least grew out of the al-Qaeda attack on US soil, which was planned out in Khost and Qandahar, and it has the backing of the UN and of NATO, which invoked article 5 of its charter (an attack on one is an attack on all).

In contrast, the Iraq War was virtually without legal foundation. In the United Nations order, there are only two legitimate preconditions for going to war. One is clear self-defense, in response to an aggressive attack. (The Gulf War, responding to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, is a case in point). The other is authorization by the UN Security Council. But W. had neither precondition on his side when he invaded Iraq, and so he acted lawlessly, as Obama saw clearly at the time.

The US Republican Party has increasingly become the party of fear. Shock and awe was designed to scare the international community. At home, the party sought to rule on behalf of the super-wealthy and of White nationalists and the Christian Right by making the public afraid -– of terrorism, of Muslims, implicitly of minorities. Fear as a tool of statecraft has no place in an Enlightenment republic.

As obvious as Cole's statement is, there are some who'd disagree. While Bush at least tried to make a distinction between Islam and terrorism, it'd be hard to argue that he tried hard enough or enjoyed any success on that front. Our current situation, where the right has become a pack of cowards afraid of religious liberty, demonstrates that well enough. The War on Terror has become a War on Islam. And Bush's statement that "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists" has many concluding that President Obama is with the terrorists, since he supports the Constitutional principle of religious freedom. One in five now believe the president is a Muslim -- an increase driven mostly by Republican responses to a new Pew poll. Islam is the enemy, the president is siding with Islam, therefore the president is the enemy. A decade of neoconservative fearmongering as produced a nation of lunatic cowards who wave the flag and talk about liberty a lot, but whose only real issues are safety from various and sundry international conspiracies that exist mostly in their imaginations.

But of course, the rehabilitation of George W. Bush and his catastrophically stupid invasion has been underway for a long time. And, for some, now is the time to step up the effort.

The Hill:

...McCain criticized President Obama's approach to the Iraq War as a senator, saying if he and congressional Democrats had their way, the war would have been lost.

"If Barack Obama had his way as a United States senator," U.S. troops would have had to withdraw early and "over time radical Islamic extremists would have taken over that country," the senator said on KFYI Radio in Arizona.

"We would have surrendered -- waved the white flag of surrender and lost," he said, adding that "none of those people [Democrats] are being held accountable."

Actually, if Barack Obama had had his way, we would never have even been in Iraq. In 2002, as an Illinois state senator, Obama said, "What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income -- to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression... That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics... I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history."

Beat that, Senator McCain.

Yesterday's withdrawal was not the end. Not by a longshot. But it was an important step toward peace. It was also a step that no sane nation should ever have had to take. There was no reason to invade Iraq and, having made that mistake, the only reason to stay was to try to limit the damage from that idiotic action. The war became a self-justifying thing, a monster put together from the remaining shreds of our sense of responsibility and our conscience. As Colin Powell warned would be the case, we broke it, so we bought it. And we're supposed to forget we broke it on purpose. We're also supposed to ignore the fact that we've turned into a nation of pansies, afraid of our own shadows and the mosque down the street. We mistake bluster for strength and belligerence for courage and we believe that hate is a virtue, so long as that hatred is pure and passionate enough. If the hatred is of high enough quality, we call it "patriotism."

I'm tempted to say that we may have done as much damage to America as we did to Iraq, but that would be insanely hyperbolic. Still, it'd be hard to argue that the long period of hate and fear and lies and idiocy that was the Bush administration and their wars have left us unscathed. This isn't the country we used to be. This is a stupid country, a fearful country, a reactionary and gullible country, poorer now both morally and materially.

But last night, we took one step down a long road, back in the right direction. It's going to be a real hike, but we don't have any choice but to take it.

-Wisco


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The Media, Massa, Paris Hilton, and Afghanistan

Not feeling 100% this morning -- late winter cold or early spring fever or a combination of both, I think. Anyway, it's going to be short today. Luckily, I found a guy to guest-blog for me, so here ya go:

Politico:

In a speech on the House floor, an angry [Rep. Patrick] Kennedy turned a speech on Afghanistan into a finger-pointing lecture to the Washington press.

"If anybody wants to know where cynicism is … cynicism is that there is one … two press people in this gallery," Kennedy said, angrily pointing to the press gallery where reporters sit. "We're talking about Eric Massa 24/7 on the TV. We're talking about war and peace, $3 billion, 1,000 lives and no press?"

"No press!" Kennedy repeated, his voice cracking. "You wanna know why the American public is fit? They're fit because they're not seeing their Congress do the work that they're sent to do."

"It's because the press, the press of the United States, is not covering the most significant issue of national importance, and that is the laying of lives down in the nation for the service of our country. ... It's despicable, the national press corps right now!" Kennedy said before being cut off by Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), who was presiding over the chamber.

Granted, Erik Massa is a big story, but where was Afghanistan before that story broke? There's an honest to God war on -- a war of debatable merit -- and there's no coverage. Part of the problem here is that there's no debate of those debatable merits. Democrats and President Obama have painted themselves into a corner on Afghanistan. They supported occupying Afghanistan as a way to avoid looking weak for opposing the occupation of Iraq. It may have been a good short term strategy (politically speaking, anyway), but in the long term, maybe not so much. And Republicans? Well, what do you need to say, other than it's a war. If it involves converting massive amounts of money into bombs, then blowing all that money up, they're all for it. It's what they do. There's your bipartisanship for you -- we can all agree to kill people and blow up money, but we can't get it together to save people's lives and save our own money with decent, affordable healthcare. Yay for bipartisanship.

At issue was a resolution to withdraw from Afghanistan. It was doomed to failure and lost big -- 65 yeas to 356 nays. Support withdrawal? Fine. Don't support it? Fine.

But shouldn't a real war be some kind of an issue to somebody? Doesn't an issue this big and this consequential deserve some kind of debate? And not just in congress but, as Rep. Kennedy points out, in the press?

Otherwise, the "forgotten war" will just keep on being forgotten. We can still chase around Erik Massa or whatever other scandal-of-the-day is out there. It's a 24 hour news cycle -- there's plenty of time. We'd still have time to find out what Paris Hilton had for breakfast.

But can't we get an hour or two for Afghanistan?

-Wisco


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Someone Want to Tell Limbaugh There's a War On?

A lot of people think that Rush Limbaugh is knowledgeable and intelligent. Those people couldn't be more wrong. Yes, he commands a big audience by talk radio standards, but it isn't all that hard to convince a pack of idiots that you know what you're talking about. On issue after issue, Limbaugh not only demonstrates no understanding of politics and the law, but that even the most very basic facts are beyond him. There have been a few real boners over the years, but none as bad as Monday's gaffe.

Raw Story:

During is Feb. 15 broadcast, the man commonly credited as the strongest voice in the Republican party spun his reality-bending spiel after suggesting that big-box retail chain Walmart lobbies Washington lawmakers to keep Obama from "nationalizing" them -- a statement that, if not a joke, can only be characterized as transparently false.

"The last time this happened was World War II," Limbaugh said. "But that was because there was a war on and it made sense. But there's no war on right now, other than the Taliban wing of the Republican party and its war against Obama and the Democrats."

Even as he declared "there's no war on right now," American and NATO troops waged a house-to-house campaign in the Afghan city of Marjah. In the month of January alone, 32 U.S. soldiers died from wounds inflicted by improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan, amid a dramatic spike in violence. A total of 317 U.S. soldiers died prosecuting the war in 2009; at time of this writing, another 43 had already been felled so far in 2010, according to iCasualties.org. In Iraq, while violence is down from years past, 4,376 American soldiers have been killed since President George W. Bush launched the war in 2003.

Obviously, there is a war on -- two, in fact -- and Limbaugh himself was once a big fan of both of them. Had someone on the left screwed up this bad, Limbaugh would dedicate a three hour show to it. It would be proof that the left is out of touch, that they never think of the troops in the field, that they don't understand, let alone appreciate, the sacrifices made on our behalf.





But Rush himself did it, so somehow, it'll be cool. It does point to one problem that almost no one is talking about; we've fought these wars for so long that it's become background noise. When the war in Iraq is officially over, it'll will become the second longest war in American history. The longest will be Afghanistan. War has become a constant in our lives, so much so that we've come to confuse our current state with peace. I'm not making an excuse for Limbaugh who, as a "pundit," is expected to know what the hell he's talking about. But I'm explaining how easily the mistake could be made by someone else. It's especially galling for Limbaugh to do it, after constantly attacking President Obama for ignoring the "War on Terror." The WoT is an actual, honest to goodness war, Limbaugh and others on the right argue. To drop that argument so easily and offhandedly shows you how much Limbaugh believes it.

But Afghanistan is a real war and has been called the forgotten war. All of our attention -- left and right -- has been on Iraq. But the war in Afghanistan roars on, whether we're paying attention or not.

L.A. Times:

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and The Outskirts Of Marja, Afghanistan -- As U.S. Marines battled Sunday to consolidate their hold on the southern Afghanistan town of Marja, Western commanders reported the first serious setback of the 2-day-old offensive: the deaths of a dozen Afghan civilians in an errant rocket strike.

At least four of those killed were children, an Afghan government official said.

U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of Western forces in Afghanistan, apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the deaths. The fatalities marked the first instance of large-scale civilian casualties since the start of fighting in Nad Ali, the district in central Helmand province where Marja lies.

"We regret this tragic accident and offer our sympathies to the families of those killed and injured," said Maj Gen Michael Regner. "Our combined forces take every precaution to minimise civilian casualties and we will investigate this incident to determine how this happened."

Allow me to make an argument that Regner -- or Limbaugh, for that matter -- would never make; those people were killed deliberately.

Not those very Afghan civilians, but some Afghan civilians. Follow me here; if you'd asked anyone who was in any way realistic about war if there would be civilian casualties, the only honest answer would be "of course." If you take a course of action that youknow will result in civilian deaths, you can't come back later and say you didn't mean to kill any civilians. Not honestly and logically, anyway. You did something that you were sure would kill civilians and you were right. You can say you didn't mean to kill these particular civilians, but someone was going to lose that backwards lottery and you knew it. People are dead and you knew it would happen.

To make matters worse, while all of this deliberate death is going on, we're busy pretending it's not. Maybe we're sick of war, but imagine how Afghans feel.

Of course, imagining how Afghans feel would require some compassion. Not to mention some admission of responsibility from fair weather war cheerleaders like Limbaugh. So that's not going to happen. What will happen is that people like Limbaugh will become so tangled up in their own denial and vitriol that they forget the killing is happening at all.

-Wisco


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Expecting More of Obama

Big night last night. The president's announcement of an escalation of the Afghanistan war managed to make few people happy. On the right, this can be explained -- to a large extent, anyway -- by kneejerk partisanship. For them, Barack Obama can do no right. They don't like that the president set a 18-month timeline to begin withdrawal. But it's not hard to imagine that, had he gone with an Bush-like open-ended commitment, they would be criticizing him for not having an exit strategy.

With the media stuck in the 2008 presidential campaign, it should be less surprising that they keep running to John McCain for reactions to Obama's actions. They don't seem to realize that there is now no way that McCain/Palin can still win it (it's over, guys). But they keep doing it and I keep wondering why. Still, McCain gives what we can call the unofficial Republican response on ABC's Good Morning America today:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the leading Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said while he agrees with the president's decision to up the number of troops, setting a timeline for withdrawal will only allow the Taliban to regroup and emerge stronger when U.S. forces leave Afghanistan.

"I support the president's decision to have a properly resourced counter insurgency strategy," McCain told "Good Morning America's" Robin Roberts today. "My only difference... is setting a date for return... Dates should be determined by success on the ground not by the calendar."

Remember that whole "commanders in the field" thing Bush used to pull? He'd basically argue that the president is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces and, as such, he couldn't do anything that the Pentagon didn't agree with. It didn't make any sense then and it doesn't now, but McCain seemed to buy it at the time. You wonder why he doesn't buy it now.





"I'm absolutely supportive of the timeline," says Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top "commander in the field," "The 18 months timeline, however, is not an absolute. It's not an 18 months and everybody leaves. The president has expressed on numerous occasions a long-term strategic partnership with Afghanistan and that includes all manners of assistance."

So there's that. Other reactions have been as predictably reactionary.

It seems clear that if we want legitimate criticism of Obama's plan for Afghanistan, we'll have to point our eyes leftward.

MSNBC's FirstRead:

Democrat Russ Feingold (WI) today suggested there is a "significant" number of Senate Democrats with concerns about the administration's plan to increase troops in Afghanistan.

[...]

"I was just in a Democratic conference lunch, and I spoke out on this," he said on the Senate floor. "And I won't say who-said-what, but the number of people who joined me in expressing these very concerns was significant. Many members in my caucus, and I believe members of the Republican caucus -- perhaps from different philosophical prospective -- will come to the same conclusion that this is a mistake to move in the direction of this huge troop buildup."

It sounds like we won't have to look far on the left to get that criticism. A "significant" number can mean a lot of things, but it can't mean "a few." Feingold doesn't really play those word games anyway. Take it from someone who's lived in his state his entire career -- Russ Feingold is blunt. If he says the number is "significant," then it is. Or, at least, he believes it is.

But this leaves everyone on the left -- Obama, those who support his decision, and those who oppose it -- in a difficult position. For Obama, he's already made his concession to progressives -- he's included a timeline for withdrawal. Had this happened with Bush and Iraq, Democrats would've popped the champagne and declared victory. Party hats and whistles all around.

On the other hand, Democrats opposed to the increase have good reason to expect more from Obama than they did of Bush. So it's logical that they would demand more of him than they did of Bush. Where a timeline for withdrawal from Bush would've been acceptable to most Democrats, that acceptance would've been the result of what Bush himself once called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

For Obama, there is no such soft bigotry. And this is were the problem stems for everyone. Progressives need to expect more, while Obama seems to believe he can't do more. Something has to give and it's hard to see where the give will be.

-Wisco


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In the Graveyard of Empires

Like most problems his administration faces, Obama inherited the the war in Afghanistan from his predecessor, George W. Bush. And, like most of these Bush legacies, it's the result of incompetence, neglect, and an obsession with neoconservative ideology. Afghanistan is a big pile of military blunders and foreign policy mistakes. Let's look at the military side and just focus on the obvious for a moment.

Afghanistan is well-known as the "graveyard of empires," an impossible terrain in a difficult to reach region of the world. It's nation of mountain ranges with mile after mile of natural fortresses. Fighting a war on two fronts is a classic military mistake and Bush made it by deciding to invade Iraq -- for no good reason. Iraq became the "central front on the war on terror," with Afghanistan becoming a nearly forgotten adventure that popped up in the news occasionally. We were fighting a war in what very well may be the most dangerous region of the world and doing it halfheartedly. Combine this with installing a corrupt puppet government and you could only screw things up worse if you tried.

But it wasn't only Bush who was making strategic mistakes here. At home, especially on the campaign trail, Democrats used the Afghanistan war to beef up their own military bona fides. They pointed out everything that I just have, while thumping their chest and proclaiming themselves better at war. Barack Obama may have inherited the Afghanistan war, but he also used it as political leverage against Iraq war supporters -- he wasn't some hippy-dippy peacenik, he wasn't against war, he just didn't like the Iraq war. Why, lookie here at the Afghanistan war -- now there's a war someone ought to win.





It's impossible to say whether this particular war would've been won or lost by now if the Bush administration hadn't distracted themselves with their fun little snipe hunt in Iraq. But I think it would've been over by now, win or lose. The Bush administration, dominated by starry-eyed dreamers who thought they were neocon supermen, were certain they could have everything and that nothing in history applied to them. They were special, they were the first realists to ever walk the face of the earth, geniuses to a one and pretty damned near infallible.

The result was disaster on all fronts. All they really managed to do was to keep the ball rolling long enough for someone else to come along and fix it all. And Barack Obama was the guy who came along.

New York Times:

President Obama issued orders to send about 30,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan as he prepared to address the nation Tuesday night to explain what may be one of the most defining decisions of his presidency.

Mr. Obama conveyed his decision to military leaders late Sunday afternoon during a meeting in the Oval Office and then spent Monday phoning foreign counterparts, including the leaders of Britain, France and Russia.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, declined to say how many additional troops would be deployed, but senior administration officials previously have said that about 30,000 will go in coming months, bringing the total American force to about 100,000.

30,000 is the number everyone seems to be using. If there's anything good to be taken away from this, it's that the kid who fixes the jams in the Obama White House copymachines is probably smarter than anyone in the Bush administration. But this is an unsatisfying takeaway.

If it were me, I'd blow off the classical military strategies in Afghanistan. History shows that this "blow stuff up and kill lots of people" way of doing things doesn't accomplish much. What I would do would be different.

I'd take all the troops that were there now and secure the largest contiguous area we could safely secure. Then I'd turn that area into Awesome City. We're talking freakin' Disneyland here. All the money we'd be spending on blowing things up, we'd spend on building. There are people in Afghanistan who not only don't have electricity, but don't know what electricity is. Simple infrastructure work would look like a miracle to many of them. Move your gaze a few countries over to the middle east; people don't like Hamas because they blow things up, they like them because they build and do charity work. The thing you don't hear about much in the west is that Hamas builds hospitals and schools. They do things their governments fail to do.

We don't have to play a classic offense/defense game -- which history shows is a loser anyway -- we can play a defense/defense game and win the war by fighting it in people's heads. If NATO-controlled Afghanistan is Awesome City and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is Sucktown, where do you think most people are going to want to live? And how much popular support do you think that would leave the Taliban? Who's going to join the Sucktown Defense League?

But, of course, I'm not Commander in Chief. Whatever we do in Afghanistan, Republicans and Democrats should remember that they blew it. Republicans can blame themselves for backing the invasion of Iraq and Democrats can blame themselves pushing Afghanistan to prove they aren't "soft on terrorism" or pacifist pansies.

There's going to be a lot of finger-pointing down the road, but few of those fingers will be attached to clean hands.

-Wisco


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'The Only Solution Given is Pills'

The Army has a bit of a problem. Despite efforts to curb suicide among troops, Army suicides continue to rise. "One week after the U.S. Army announced record suicide rates among its soldiers last year, the service is worried about a spike in possible suicides in the new year," CNN reported yesterday. "The Army said it already has confirmed seven suicides, with 17 additional cases pending that it believes investigators will confirm as suicides for January.

"If those prove true, more soldiers will have killed themselves than died in combat last month. According to Pentagon statistics, there were 16 U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in January."

In fact, the Army has seen a rise in suicide every year for the past four years. To combat the problem, the service has created a "battle-buddy" program, which is basically the buddy system for suicide, but this has turned out to be as ineffective as you might have thought it would be.

In 2005, in testimony to a House Appropriations subcommittee, the Army’s surgeon general placed the blame squarely on the troops. "That’s still part of our culture: Real men don’t see [mental health counselors]…" said Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley. "I would like to see a culture that resets the force mentally." Macho, tough guy culture was killing troops, but it seems a pretty safe assumption that this culture had been with the Army longer than its suicide problem. I don't remember the Army having a previous reputation as being a place for sharing and emotional support. Clearly, this "real men" culture -- which, of course, includes real women -- may be aggravating the problem, but it couldn't possibly be the cause.

For their part, the Army seems at a loss to explain the real cause of the suicides. "This is terrifying," Col. Kathy Platoni, chief clinical psychologist for the Army Reserve and National Guard told CNN. "We do not know what is going on." She speculated that maybe it was winter blahs.

"There is more hopelessness and helplessness because everything is so dreary and cold," she said.

"But Platoni said she sees the multiple deployments, stigma associated with seeking treatment and the excessive use of anti-depressants as ongoing concerns for mental-health professionals who work with soldiers," CNN reported.

Now we're getting someplace.





"Unfortunately, I don't find [the rise in suicides] very surprising," John Soltz, an Iraq war vet and founder of VoteVets.org, told MSNBC's Tamron Hall. He said that, of the some 160,000 troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, "twenty thousand of them are medicated on different things like Prozac and Zoloft."

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD, Soltz said, wasn't considered seriously enough and, if a soldier does complain of mental or emotional stress, Army doctors will "just give you a pill and send you back to combat."

In a June TIME magazine piece titled "America's Medicated Army" journalist Mark Thompson spoke to a service member about his experience in Iraq. "You don't always know who the bad guys are. When you search someone's house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there's little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor -- things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would," said Sergeant Christopher LeJeune. "It's not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they're having over there for a variety of reasons. If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills." LeJeune says he was given the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam.

Looking at the warnings, this seems like an insane combination. Zoloft warnings include, "You may have thoughts about suicide when you first start taking an antidepressant, especially if you are younger than 24 years old." Meanwhile, clonazepam users are warned, "People who have underlying depression should be closely monitored while taking clonazepam, especially if they are at risk for attempting suicide."

In May of 2006, the Hartford Courant did an investigation of the military's drug prescription practices and found "a growing number of mentally troubled service members who are being kept in combat and treated with potent psychotropic medications -- a little-examined practice driven in part by a need to maintain troop strength."

Among the paper's findings:

-Antidepressant medications with potentially serious side effects are being dispensed with little or no monitoring and sometimes minimal counseling, despite FDA warnings that the drugs can increase suicidal thoughts.

-Military doctors treating combat stress symptoms are sending some soldiers back to the front lines after rest and a three-day regimen of drugs -- even though experts say the drugs typically take two to six weeks to begin working.

-The emphasis on maintaining troop numbers has led some military doctors to misjudge the severity of mental health symptoms.

If John Soltz's numbers are correct, these conditions are true for 12.5% of troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the Army isn't tracking this at all. The TIME article tells us, "At a Pentagon that keeps statistics on just about everything, there is no central clearinghouse for this kind of data, and the Army hasn't consistently asked about prescription-drug use, which makes it difficult to track." In fact, TIME tells us:

Military families wonder about the [Army's reliance on prescription drugs], according to Joyce Raezer of the private National Military Family Association. "Boy, it's really nice to have these drugs," she recalls a military doctor saying, "so we can keep people deployed." And professionals have their doubts. "Are we trying to bandage up what is essentially an insufficient fighting force?" asks Dr. Frank Ochberg, a veteran psychiatrist and founding board member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Given everything we know about the use of psychotropic drugs to medicate soldiers, it seems amazing that few would make the connection with the rising suicide rates. But admitting the connection would've meant an admission of failure by the Bush administration -- something they just didn't do. The military was "completely overextended by the Bush administration," said Soltz, adding that he hoped the Obama administration would do a better job of addressing these issues.

That hope should be shared by most of us, since it seems pretty clear that we're killing our own troops in an attempt to keep them in the field.

-Wisco

Firing Blackwater USA

A few days ago, Blackwater USA CEO Erik Prince wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. The gist of it is that the mercenary corporation is absolutely wonderful and we should just go ahead and ignore the fact that five guards were charged in an atrocity that left 17 unarmed Iraqis dead and involved a rocket-propelled grenade fired into a girls' school. These guys face a possible 47 years in prison for crimes ranging from weapons charges to voluntary manslaughter.

We're told Blackwater employees are "putting their lives at risk each day to protect U.S. Department of State officials and other civilians working in the country. Yet somehow that role and the part they play in this war have been grossly misunderstood." Unfortunately, Prince doesn't really explain why Blackwater is protecting that diplomatic corps. And no one else can either. Before the Bush administration, State Department employees were guarded by US Marines and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security -- an agency similar to the Secret Service. After Bush, Marines and federal cops were somehow not good enough anymore -- we had to hire rent-a-cops with machine guns. But it's the Bush administration, it doesn't have to make any sense. It just is. The fact that Prince and his family were significant donors to the Republican party and Bush's campaigns probably had nothing at all to do with it. Replacing US Marines with Blackwater employees was absolutely necessary because... Well, just because. Remember, if there's any possible way to privatize something, then Bushies go ahead and privatize it. The idea that government is hopelessly incompetent and wasteful extends even to the US Marine Corps. Way to support the troops, George.

But it turns out that Prince realized he had a bit of a public relations problem on his hand. Blackwater employees -- who have been regularly described as "thugs" -- didn't have the shiniest public reputation and that rep needed a little buffing. "What he says is less important that the fact that he's saying it at all," wrote Daniel Schuman for Mother Jones. Erik Prince, normally willing to shut up and let the Bush administration to all the Blackwater apologism, was forced to make his own case. Bush administration officials weren't rushing to the company's defense.





Turns out there was a reason for that. A leaked internal State Department report recommends firing Mercenaries-R-Us.

BBC:

Blackwater could lose its licence to operate in Iraq, rendering it unable to provide security for US diplomats, a US State Department internal report says.

The report, commissioned by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said the department should look for other ways to protect diplomats, US media said.

Ms Rice ordered a review of the use of private security firms after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians.

"Blackwater's contract with the US government comes up for renewal early next year," the piece tells us, "so the decision on whether to renew it will be taken by US President-elect Barack Obama's administration." Assumedly, by future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Some have pointed out that Clinton's tied to Blackwater herself -- at least, tangentially. Mark Penn -- a top campaign adviser Clinton eventually fired -- worked for a firm that did PR work for Blackwater. All in all, a pretty weak link. In fact, her own views toward the company are made a little clearer by her past actions.

After the incident in Iraq, Clinton issued a statement. "From this war's very beginning, this administration has permitted thousands of heavily-armed military contractors to march through Iraq without any law or court to rein them in or hold them accountable," it read. "These private security contractors have been reckless and have compromised our mission in Iraq. The time to show these contractors the door is long past due." Not exactly a fan letter. She didn't stop there.

TPMMuckraker:

[I]n late February, Clinton became the sole Senate cosponsor of a bill, S.2398, the Stop Outsourcing Security Act that had been introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

In a major speech on Iraq a couple of weeks later, Hillary reiterated her support for removing private contractors from "combat-oriented and security functions in Iraq."

"For five years their behavior and lack of supervision and accountability have often eroded our credibility, endangered U.S. and Iraqi lives and undermined our mission," she noted.

Erik Prince clearly has no friend in Hillary Clinton. In fact, wording within the Stop Outsourcing Security Act reads, "Not later than 6 months after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State shall ensure that all personnel at any United States diplomatic or consular mission in Iraq are provided security services only by Federal Government personnel."

Oddly, it was Barack Obama who was less enthusiastic about removing Blackwater. The TPMMuckraker piece tells us, "The transition's official Web site only says that Obama will 'establish the legal status of contractor personnel, making possible prosecution of any abuses committed by private military contract.'" I suppose you could argue that with State's new report and its recommendation that Blackwater be canned, Obama would be open to the idea. Clearly, Blackwater's presence in Iraq serves no logical purpose and the US government should not be in the business of making busy work for mercenaries.

Especially these mercenaries. "A congressional investigation found that private State Department security contractors from Blackwater alone were involved in nearly 200 'escalation of force' incidents between 2005 and 2007, including multiple killings of Iraqi civilians," TPM tells us. In other words, as security guards go, these guys suck.

And now it's official. A report written under Rice's leadership -- not Clinton's -- recommends Blackwater be fired. It's hard to think of any argument against that recommendation.

But that hasn't stopped Erik Prince from trying.

-Wisco

Those Ungrateful Iraqis

It may turn out to be one of the most lasting images of the Bush presidency. The leader of the free world ducks as an angry journalist throws a shoe at him. President Bush was in Iraq to sign an agreement that would require -- by Iraqi and international law -- that occupying US forces withdraw. Shoes were thrown, things went haywire, and we had the Iraq war in miniature -- a nearly perfect metaphor for the whole thing. While Bush was talking about how wonderful things are in Iraq, Iraqis hate him for how awful things are in Iraq. Telling that lie here, where we're protected from the truth by a play-along media, is one thing. Telling that lie there, where they live with the truth every day, is another thing entirely.

Middle east expert Juan Cole tells us that the shoe-thrower, Muntazir al-Zaidi, was reacting to the things he had witnessed in his country, calling out, "Killer of Iraqis, killer of children!" as the guards took him down.

[Zaidi] had covered the US bombing of Sadr City last spring, in support of PM Nuri al-Maliki's incursion into this stronghold of the Sadr Movement and its Mahdi Army, and is said to have been emotionally affected by the sight of that destruction

The frequent US bombing of civilian Iraqi cities that are already under US military occupation has been one of the most under-reported stories of the Iraq War.

Raining death from above tends to make people angry, I guess. As an American, I wouldn't know -- that's just something that happens in other places. Places we invade. It's the sort of thing that we do to other countries, so I wouldn't have any idea what it feels like, what it looks like, what it smells like, or how it the memories wake you up in a cold sweat. Never having been on the receiving end of aerial bombings, I'm not in a position to know these sort of things. Living within the empire has its privileges.





But, as realistic as I am about what war in your front yard might do to a person, others are less circumspect. Where some of us -- i.e., those who are either sane or aren't pricks -- recognize that most people wouldn't like having bombs dropped on their heads, others don't. They may lack empathy or they may believe that their world view is more important than even lives or they may just be as stupid as boxes of rocks, but there are those who don't see the problem. These people believe that Iraqis should not only be OK with their neighborhoods -- and their neighbors -- being blown all to hell in a stupid, needless war in search of a reason for existing, but that they should be grateful for the honor.

I think, at this point, we should probably call these people exactly what they are -- sick sons of bitches. For example, NPR's Juan Williams. Juan sat in on Bill O'Reilly's unfortunate BS show and got all bent out of shape that Zairi didn't throw a thank you note at Bush.

But on a serious level, how many American lives have been sacrificed to the cause of liberating Iraq? How much money has been spent while they’re not spending their own profits from their oil? American money. So I just think it’s absolutely the act of an ingrate for them to behave in this way. Just unbelievable to me.

What a total ass. What a complete waste of a nondescript, TV-friendly suit. We invade their damned country for no real reason -- or, at least, for no legitimate reason -- blow the living hell out of everything, create a massive refugee crisis, enable a wave of ethnic cleansing, reduce entire cities to either rubble, anarchy, or both, our military and our mercenaries commit atrocities, and Juan Williams can't believe they aren't grateful. What a useless, useless human being.

National Review's Andy McCarthy is similarly useless, repeating the same talking points:

Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous…and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates. That stubborn fact complicates everything.

This is all part of a concerted effort by conservatives to resell the Iraq invasion and repair the historical legacy of George W. Bush. While Bush feels the need to be remembered as anything other than the worst president in American history, these pundits need to be seen as not stupid. And, since they stupidly supported this invasion, they have to convince you that the invasion was not only a really good idea, but that it's going swimmingly. The fear is that someone will realize that they've been wrong about everything -- and continue to be wrong. For professional opinion-givers, it's not helpful when everyone agrees your opinions are idiocy.

As the Bush years wind down, everyone on the right is busy rewriting history. The whole Iraq enterprise is wonderful and perfect and beautiful. After January 20th, it's all going to be Obama's fault. They're desperate to launch the narrative that everything was going gangbusters right up until a new president messed with it -- then everything went all to hell. Thankfully, some in the media aren't buying it. When neocon pundit Frank Gaffney appeared on MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews wouldn't let him get away with it:

MATTHEWS: You guys sold the war as a nuclear threat to the United States. A nuclear weapon was going to be delivered by a nuclear delivery device. It was going to take the weapon and drop it here. You sold every trick you could to get us into this war. Now you’re back pedaling. And I do find it astounding. The Vice President of the United States is --

GAFFNEY: How do you feel, Chris?

MATTHEWS: This is how I feel. Four thousand people are dead because of how you feel. And Frank, you’re wrong about this because you don’t even seem to care your facts were wrong.

GAFFNEY: Chris, there were --

MATTHEWS: You admit your facts were wrong and it doesn’t bother you.

GAFFNEY: May I state my position rather than you stating it? May I do that? My position is that it’s regrettable that any Americans died. It is regrettable that they had to die, but I believe they did have to die.

For what, Frank Gaffney? They had to die for what? Anyone who remembers the first Gulf War remembers just how ineffective -- almost comically so -- the Iraqi military was against US forces. In the years between then and the invasion, despite the sanctions on Iraq, we're supposed to believe that Saddam managed to inflate his military might to the point where Iraq was on par with an honest to goodness superpower that had completely defeated him so embarrassingly just a few years before? Really? Really?

I'm not ruling out the possibility that Frank Gaffney -- as well as Juan Williams and Andy McCarthy -- may just be stupid enough to believe that. But I'm not. Iraq was never a real threat to the US.

"Bush the Hero" isn't going to be the image people carry forward after he leaves office, as much as these professional BS artists need that to be the case. The last image from the Bush administration will probably be him ducking that shoe, thrown by an Iraqi enraged by pointless slaughter and the simple stupidity of the neocons and their president. It'll be Bush the Unjust, Bush the Fool, Bush the Failure that we take forward and history remembers.

The self-serving lies and heartless false outrage of his fellow unjust fools and failures won't change that a bit. Too many people are committed to remembering George W. Bush as he is; an idiotic military mind, a ridiculously awful president, and a failure as a human being.

-Wisco

A Green New Deal

I guess the big news from this weekend is that some guy in Iraq winged a pair of shoes at President Bush's head. All the news reports are telling us that this is a "sign of contempt" in Iraq, but it's hard to think of a place in the world where it would be a sign of anything else. It may not be universal, but it'd still be a pretty clear signal of disrespect anywhere you go -- "And now, in our traditional welcome, we shall batter you with shoes..." Still, shoes must be dirt cheap in Iraq, because you know that guy's probably not getting them back. I'm sticking with flipping the bird. Especially in this economy.

The shoe story has been so big that it's knocked other stories off the front page. Blagejovich has become "Blag-who-evich?" If the Governor of Illinois had known that was all it took to take the media heat off him for a moment or two, he might've hired someone to throw a pair of size 10s himself. That's one way to get a little breathing room.

But the shoe-chucker also knocked a developing story off the media radar this weekend. And that story's bigger than Blago. It's a developing story with international implications. Where the neocons in the Bush administration thought they could rebuild the world by knocking stuff down and blowing people up, others want to rebuild the world by rebuilding the world.





And if there was ever a time that the world needed rebuilding, it's now. The financial crisis is global, leaving no nation untouched. At the same time, we're facing what many recognize as the challenge of our lifetime -- if not of our young century -- global warming. There's a growing consensus out there that these are two problems with a single solution.

UN News Service:

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called for renewed global solidarity to tackle the twin challenges of climate change and the financial crisis, telling ministers gathered at a United Nations conference in Poland that the world cannot afford to let economic woes hinder progress on “the defining challenge of our era.”

[...]

“The world is watching us. The next generation is counting on us. We must not fail,” he told participants from nearly 200 nations, who have been meeting for nearly two weeks as part of UN-led negotiations aimed at reaching an ambitious global climate change deal next year.

Secretary Ban used the term "Green New Deal" to describe what was needed. "An investment that fights climate change, creates millions of green jobs and spurs green growth," he said. "In short, our response to the economic crisis must advance climate goals, and our response to the climate crisis will advance economic and social goals."

This story followed other stories along the same lines. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used a weekend interview to announce that she'd seek an even larger economic stimulus package than had previously been considered. "This week we had our most recent presentations from economists to tell us what -- how robust such a package should be in order to have an impact on the economy, to turn the economy around," she said on Bloomberg TV's Political Capital with Al Hunt. "Economists told us that the package had to be strong enough, half a trillion, $600 billion, somewhere near that." A large part of that would go toward broader internet access and green energy.

And Barack Obama's thinking even bigger:

Raw Story:

President-elect Obama's transition team may double the size of a planned economic stimulus package in an effort to prevent soaring unemployment.

"Obama aides and advisers have set $600 billion over two years as 'a very low-end estimate,' one person familiar with the matter said," according to a report in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. "The final number is expected to be significantly higher, possibly between $700 billion and $1 trillion over two years."

"We won't do it the old Washington way," Obama said about his stimulus plan earlier this month. "We won't just throw money at the problem. We'll measure progress by the reforms we make and the results we achieve -- by the jobs we create, by the energy we save, by whether America is more competitive in the world."

Some see this as a return to the policies Franklin Roosevelt used to deal with the great depression. "Well, I think the government is back and we're all the better for it," says economic analyst Jeff Madrick. "In fact, the government has been away at least since Ronald Reagan...

"If we spend money at the federal level at propitious times, we can get that bottom we're talking about and begin to recover as well. Unemployment comes down. Incomes rise again... Our infrastructure is a mess. Our education needs reform. We're not attended to our energy needs, people well know now."

Economic theory has been bass-ackward since Reagan. And Bush's policies have only been an exaggeration of that trend. Where government needs to spend when times are bad and build surpluses when times are good, Republicans have been approaching everything in the opposite direction -- only worse. Spend money when times are good, borrow money when things are bad. You don't need to be economic genius to see that that's a bad idea. All the while, we're supposed to keep cutting taxes and expect government to operate on sunshine and happy thoughts. National debt skyrockets, wages stagnate, and the economy relies on paper shufflers who don't actually produce or sell anything.

On the other hand, you need something constructive to spend money on when times are bad. Some argue that it was WWII, not FDR's public works programs, that ended the depression. But that stops making sense when you think about it; we take our nation's wealth, convert it to bombs, and blow it up in Europe. As investments go, blowing up money doesn't strike me as a very good one. It was building bridges and highways and hydro-electric dams, while changing the disastrous environmental practices that led to the dustbowl, that got America on her feet again. Investments in infrastructure are investments that have returns -- we're still enjoying the fruits of those investments today. Had we followed the current Republican economic reasoning, our manufacturing base would've failed -- as it's failing today -- and we wouldn't even have had the capacity to blow up our money in Europe. If that doesn't kill the "war is good for the economy" idea, consider that we're in two wars now -- how's that working out for you? In any case, even the "war is good for the economy" argument admits that government spending helps in hard times.

So we find ourselves in a perfect time to deal with global warming. We need to invest in change, at a time when an investment in change is essential. There's a growing consensus in the world that this investment has to happen and that this investment is the way out of our mutual financial crisis. We've got the government to do it, we've got the means to do it, we've got an international call to do it.

Given that, I say we roll up our sleeves and do it.

-Wisco

The Bestest President Ever

Have you heard? George W. Bush is the Bestest President Ever -- hands down, no contest. He's the smartest and the most successful and the handsomest and we were damned lucky to have him for the last eight years. Otherwise, we'd all have been killed by al Qaeda or Democrats or bears or something. Anything good that happened to you during the Bush years? Bush's work. Anything bad? Democrats fault. That is, if it really happened at all and wasn't just media hype.

Like soviet propagandists, Team Bush is looking to edit certain events and airbrush certain people out of the history books. It's called the "legacy project" and, under the direction of master propagandist Karl Rove, the goal is to rewrite history in Bush's favor.

Weekly Standard columnist and leading neocon Stephen Hayes spilled the beans on CNN earlier this month, telling a talking-head panel, "We're going to be seeing a lot more of this and there's an ongoing Bush legacy project that's been meeting in the White House, really, with senior advisers, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes has been involved, current senior Bush administration advisers and they are looking at how to sort of roll out the President's legacy."





It's typical of Bush and the neocon mindset. All problems are problems of perception -- if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there, it doesn't make a sound. If you can't be happy and informed, then the obvious solution is to be happy and ignorant. Failing that, the next best thing is to be happy and misinformed. If no one knows there's a problem, there is no problem. If everyone says there's a problem, then that's just the media over-hyping a bump in the road to "bash Bush." In the Bush White House, problems aren't solved by action, they're solved with public relations campaigns, propaganda, photo ops, and denial.

The lefty blog Think Progress, run by the Center for American Progress and Obama transition head John Podesta, has done a pretty good job of tracking the legacy project. But they cover a lot of things and it's impossible to shoot down every bit of propaganda that comes out of the White House and the Bush-friendly media.

To do that, we need pre-emption -- a word Bushies know very well. Put just about every damned failure of the Bush administration out there and have all the facts ready for the next revisionist lie that comes out of Washington. Fight fire with fire, fight a project with a project.

So we have the Center for Public Integrity detailing the failures of the Bush administration. In an investigation they call "Broken Government," CPI lists 128 failures of the Bush administration since 2000. Even that isn't comprehensive. The early failures of a surveillance plane and crew captured by China and maintaining unsafe levels of arsenic allowed in drinking water are two right off the top of my head that aren't covered. 128 is a good start, but it's still incomplete.

CPI tells us there are 45 million Americans without health care, that 1,273 whistleblower complaints were filed from 2002-2008 (1,256 were dismissed), that 30 million pounds of beef were recalled in 2007, that 2,145 troops killed and 21,000 injured in Iraq from March 2003 through November 1, 2008 by IED -- many while waiting for body armor, and that there were 935 lies told in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. That's a tiny fraction of the massive screwups that bear Bush's signature.

Seriously, reading the whole thing gives you a headache. But it's good to know that it's there. It's looking more and more like the only punishment any Bushie might face will be the judgment of history. They can't be allowed to dodge even that. And they're trying -- the White House has already issued revisionist talking points to staffers. The L.A. Times got hold of them.

The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success.

It mentions none of the episodes that detractors say have marred his presidency: the collapse of the housing market and major financial services companies, the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina or the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

In a section on the economy, speakers are invited to say that Bush cut taxes after 2001, setting the stage for years of job growth.

As for the current economic crisis, the memo says that Bush "responded with bold measures to prevent an economic meltdown."

That last one strikes me as pretty funny, since everyone knows Bush didn't actually "prevent an economic meltdown." I'm sure they'd argue that it could be much worse -- no one's resorted to cannibalism yet and we can all thank the Bestest President Ever for that. The point of the memo -- titled "Speech Topper on the Bush Record" -- is to provide Bush loyalists with handy examples of the successes of the most successful president in history. You'd think that examples would leap readily to mind, but remember -- it's all BS. Even Whitehousers have a hard time thinking of examples of Bush triumphs.

And that may be where the Bush "legacy project" fails. While they need spinny notes to come up with some sort of success to pin on Bush like a medal, all we need to do is reach into the grab bag of history and pull out pretty much anything. The Center for Public Integrity makes that a bit easier, but it wouldn't really be much of a challenge without them.

Bush's final battle will be fought against the enemy he's fought most of his battles with -- reality. It's poetic justice that his legacy project to erase his record of failure will likely be a battle he fails to win.

-Wisco

Shinseki the Realist

I would say that what's been mobilized to this point -- something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We're talking about posthostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence.
-General Eric Shinseki to Sen. Carl Levin of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on the size of the force required to invade Iraq, 2003.

That got Shinseki fired. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long argued that the US needed to use a lighter force, with the emphasis on speed, and that anything else was fighting a 21st century war from a cold war mindset. Needless to say, Shinseki was right. Rumsfeld's strategy was shortsighted and simpleminded. When we invaded Iraq, our forces were too few to defend gains. We'd chase fighters off, declare victory, then roll of in a triumphant cloud of dust. Then the fighters would return and we'd be gone. This boneheaded "strategy" of Rumsfeld's had entirely predictable results. We'd chase off Iraqi guards from munitions stores, roll off in our big American cloud, and leave these ammo dumps completely unguarded, because we didn't have enough personnel to leave behind. Munitions captured by militias and terrorists are probably still being used as IEDs to this day. Donald Rumsfeld's brilliant plan for a light, fast fighting force was just as idiotic as it seemed to be.

But before all that happened, before Shinseki was proven right, the general was forced into retirement for not buying the neocon line. Rumsfeld said Shinseki's estimate in senate testimony "will prove to be high." Deputy SecDef Paul Wolfowitz said his numbers were "way off the mark."

It wasn't until 2006 that anyone admitted that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had bet on the wrong horse. "General Shinseki was right," Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told that same committee three years later. Bush's "surge," while coming too late to correct the neocon vision for the military of the future, was basically an admission -- three years after the fact -- that Shinseki was right and the Rumsfeldian's side of the argument was as wrong as any ten year-old could've told them they were. As a result, Bush wound up claiming success for his surge, although the decrease in violence was due more to successful ethnic cleansing campaigns by militias and insurgents that might have been avoided. Violence had died down not because of an increased military presence, but because the killers had run out of people to kill. Rumsfeld's brilliant new strategy not only cost him his own job, but also countless lives. Entire neighborhoods went dark, the residents either dead or refugees.





All of which makes this a lot better news than you'd normally take it as being.

Washington Post:

President-elect Barack introduced retired Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki as his nominee to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, bringing to his Cabinet a career military officer best known for running afoul of the Bush administration by questioning the Pentagon's Iraq war strategy.

Shinseki, a four-star general and 38-year veteran who retired shortly after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, appeared with Obama in Chicago at a news conference today commemorating the 67th anniversary of the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor. Obama said Shinseki agreed to join the incoming administration because "both he and I share a reverence for those who serve."

"When I reflect on the sacrifices that have been made by our veterans and I think about how so many veterans around the country are struggling even more than those who have not served -- higher unemployment rates, higher homeless rates, higher substance-abuse rates, medical care that is inadequate -- it breaks my heart, and I think that General Shinseki is exactly the right person who is going to be able to make sure that we honor our troops when they come home," Obama told NBC News' Tom Brokaw in a interview taped for broadcast today on "Meet the Press."

"If Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and [former undersecretary for defense Douglas J.] Feith had listened to Shinseki, there wouldn't be as many wounded veterans to take care of," middle east expert Juan Cole told WaPo. "I think this is a way of saying, 'Here was a career officer who had valuable insights who was shunted aside by arrogant civilians, and we're not going to make the same kind of mistakes.'" Cole expands on his comments in a post at his blog, Informed Comment, saying "Wolfowitz was wrong about everything" and "Rumsfeld either did not know or did not care about" the responsibilities -- including those under international law -- of an occupying force.

Gen. Shinseki won't have an easy job at the VA. That department has been allowed to fester under Bush. The president who's been positively eager to hide behind the military and accuse critics of "not supporting the troops" has been an astonishingly awful president for vets. There's been the Walter Reed hospital scandal, there have been cuts to veterans' benefits, 25% of all homeless are veterans, and veteran suicides are rising. This won't be a cushy job to reward someone who stood up to the neocons in defense of reality. This will be real work.

But it's also a return to sanity. Shinseki was punished by the civilians at Bush's Defense Department for daring to bring the real world to the table. As an example of the bass-ackward thinking of the neocons, Gen. Shinseki's treatment by them is pretty much perfect.

If you want proof that government is back in the business of dealing with reality and not the neocon fantasyworld where wishing makes it so, here you go. Gen. Eric Shinseki was appointed because of his track record, not because he buys the correct ideology.

The days of sycophantic government are nearly over.

-Wisco

KBR, a Typical Privatization Story

Today, our service men and women continue to inspire and strengthen our Nation, going above and beyond the call of duty as part of the greatest military the world has ever known. Americans are grateful to all those who have put on our Nation's uniform and to their families, and we will always remember their service and sacrifice for our freedoms.
- George W. Bush, Prayer for Peace, Memorial Day, 2008

There's "above and beyond" and then there's "above and way beyond." Bush, in his "prayer for peace," neglects to tell us just what America's fighting forces are expected to face. We know about the nuts with guns and RPG rounds. We know about the roadside bombs and sectarian violence. We even know about the heat. What we don't get a lot of coverage of is how they're expected to live. Turns out, that's a really big story. And, despite having broken yesterday, it's still not getting a lot of press.

Military Times:

A Georgia man has filed a lawsuit against contractor KBR and its former parent company, Halliburton, saying the companies exposed everyone at Joint Base Balad in Iraq to unsafe water, food and hazardous fumes from the burn pit there.

Joshua Eller, who worked as a civilian computer-aided drafting technician with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, said military personnel, contractors and third-country nationals may have been sickened by contamination at the largest U.S. installation in Iraq, home to more than 30,000 service members, Defense Department civilians and contractors.

“Defendants promised the United States government that they would supply safe water for hygienic and recreational uses, safe food supplies and properly operate base incinerators to dispose of medical waste safely,” according to the lawsuit, filed Nov. 26 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. “Defendants utterly failed to perform their promised duties.”

The details are horrific.We're told about suffering from "skin lesions that subsequently spread, filled with fluid and burst," about "vomiting, cramping and diarrhea," about "severe abdominal pain." Worse, the lawsuit tells the story of "a wild dog running around base with a human arm in its mouth. The human arm had been dumped on the open air burn pit by KBR."

KBR also reused ice from mortuary trucks. Troops were served ice that "still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them..." That's above and beyond the call of duty. That's way beyond anything that should be expected of anyone.





While the lawsuit was filed by a single service member, the Times was able to provide some backup to the claims. "Military Times has received more than 100 letters from troops saying they were sickened by fumes from the burn pits, which burned plastics, petroleum products, rubber, dining-facility waste and batteries," we're told.

KBR has become the world's worst military contractor in the years since they were granted a no-bid contract by a Bush administration intent on providing business to their cronies. KBR's connection to parent company Halliburton had more to do with the contract than anything. Vice President Dick Cheney used to head up Halliburton.

KBR's actions were discovered by the military when they were "were attempting to improperly dispose of medical waste at an open-air burn pit by backing a truck full of medical waste up to the pit and emptying the contents onto the fire." The truck caught fire.

Sadly, this is nothing new. KBR's performance in Iraq has been absolutely criminal. Among the problems with the company is troops being electrocuted in showers, because of shoddy wiring in KBR constructed buildings. The pentagon knew this, but covered it up. KBR knew it, but did likewise. Neocons did what neocons do -- approached the problem as a public relations problem. If you don't know there's a problem, then there is no problem.

There was a time when the military built their own buildings, when they served their own food. But the Republican push to privatize everything under the sun succeeded and those days are gone. The reasoning -- which only works with people who are hopelessly bad at math -- tells us that private companies can always do things cheaper and more efficiently than government, so private companies should do everything government does.

But if there are X resources allocated to government, government can use it all. Private companies only have X-Y to work with, with Y equal to profit. This means cutting corners, which privatization moonies call "efficiency." Saner people call it negligence and fraud.

Worse, since these companies are all about profit, corners are cut acutely. For instance, KBR is accused of a crime that's either false imprisonment or slavery -- you make the call.

McClatchy Newspapers:

About 1,000 Asian men who were hired by a Kuwaiti subcontractor to the U.S. military have been confined for as long as three months in windowless warehouses near the Baghdad airport without money or a place to work.

Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor to KBR, an engineering, construction and services company, hired the men, who're from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. On Tuesday, they staged a march outside their compound to protest their living conditions....

The laborers said they paid middlemen more than $2,000 to get to Iraq for jobs that they were told would earn them $600 to $800 a month. Some of the men took out loans to cover the fees.

According to the report, "The men live in three warehouses with long rows of bunk beds crammed tightly together. Reporters who tried to get a better glimpse inside were ushered away by armed guards." The workers had to pay for the privilege of being imprisoned in a warehouse in Iraq. Now that's profit.

How long are we going to let the privatization moonies pull this crap? We have all the evidence we'll ever need that the whole idea is deeply, deeply flawed. It doesn't work, it encourages fraud and other crimes, and it produces really crappy service. Like the free market moonyism that's been dealt a tremendous blow by the market meltdown, privatization moonyism should be reeling as well.

But the corporate media has been laying down on the job here. They'll report these things, sure -- but then they go away. We're freaking out about bailouts and the celebrity scandal of the week, while soldiers in Iraq are being poisoned and electrocuted, while people are being enslaved, while we're all being ripped off. Every one of these stories should be a huge scandal on the scale of the response to Hurricane Katrina (another failure of privatization, by the way) but they come and go like yesterday's weather report. The stories are reported and then forgotten.

I guess the moral of this story is that if government can do something for itself, then it should. I think the Armed Forces of the United States are probably capable of running a goddam kitchen. I think they can probably throw stuff into a fire as well as anyone else. In fact, as each of these examples demonstrate, they can do it better -- because they couldn't possibly do it worse.

Meanwhile, maybe we can get KBR execs to run a prison kitchen -- personally, while they serve their sentences. Dick Cheney can make the freedom fries.

-Wisco

The Price Tag

There's a popular myth out there that jobs and wealth are created by businesses. This isn't true. Jobs and wealth are created by demand. I could open a business selling something for which there is zero demand and all the people I hired would be out of work again as soon as I went under. Consumers create jobs and wealth, not suppliers. It always gets me when people talk about business owners and CEOs as "job creators" -- they're not.

Likewise, Wall Street doesn't create wealth. Wall Street trades on wealth. Wealth is comes from the creation of objects for which there is a demand. These objects can be solid and tangible, like a boat or a hamburger, or they can be more conceptual, like a newspaper column or a novel. But it has to be a noun. Value is added to things that already exist by labor. The dead cow becomes the hamburger, the blank page becomes the novel. No one pays money for something they could easily find lying around. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

In the bailout debate, we're left arguing over whether the product of labor is worth more than the business of capital. Granted, the auto industry has pulled a lot of boneheaded maneuvers, but the fact is that the root of their problem is identical to the banking industry's problem -- a credit crunch. Car sales are just as dependent on loans as Wall Street. When it's hard to get a loan, it's hard to buy a car.





What would it really cost to bailout the automakers -- and, with them, all the labor involved? They're looking for $25 billion which, granted, is an insanely huge amount of money. But Politico's Roger Simon sees things in perspective:

I do not understand why some people are opposed to a $25 billion government bailout of the U.S. auto industry.

The price is cheap. That $25 billion represents less than three months of the cost of the Iraq war.

To put it another way: If Barack Obama would end the Iraq war just three months early, he could pay for the entire U.S. auto industry bailout, and have about $5 billion left over to spend on luxury items like U.S. education, health care and the environment.

"But nobody is putting it that way," he writes. "The media have grown bored with the Iraq war. We seem more fascinated with who is going to be the next deputy undersecretary of party hats at the inauguration than the continued fighting and dying in Iraq."

When all is said and done, it's likely that we will have dumped $3 trillion down a rathole in some godforsaken desert. The return on that investment will be zero. We're pouring that money down that rathole as we speak, yet we're supposed to be freaking out over a fraction of that amount being spent elsewhere. It's like worrying that the naked man standing out in the snow isn't wearing mittens. The naked man has bigger problems.

And some of the cost of the Iraq war can't be measured in dollars. In a Washington Post piece titled "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq," an military interrogator wrote sunday that what we're doing in Iraq is costing us dearly in more than monetary terms. Matthew Alexander helped gather the intelligence that finally brought down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, and managed to do it without torture.

"I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information," he wrote. "I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of 'ruses and trickery'). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi."

In contrast, he calls the methods used by other teams "deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American." We should all consider that last one -- un-American. If we give up everything we stand for, then what are we protecting? You can't torture people and say it's in the name of justice, you can't invade other countries without reason and say you're fighting for freedom. Whatever it is we are fighting for in Iraq, it's not any America I recognize and it's not any America I want to have a damned thing to do with. It's cruel, it's stupid, it's brutal, and it's evil. How expensive is that?

I'm an atheist, so I'm not really comfortable talking about the soul. But, as a metaphor for our humanity and our sense of justice, it's pretty handy. And it's in that sense that I mean it when I say that what we're doing in Iraq is costing us our soul -- both nationally and individually. These things are being done in our name, just as surely as it's our money that's being poured down that rathole. Since this is a democracy (or, at least, the closest approximation of one I know of), we all share responsibility.

What's the price tag on that? How expensive are we willing to let the occupation in Iraq become in that sense? Whatever your answer to is that, add $3 trillion in more tangible reckoning.

I'm not saying we should ignore the cost of a possible big three bailout. And I'm not saying the automakers are off the hook for making big and drastic changes. But I am saying that there's a broader picture out there and it pays to consider it. There are other prices we should be freaking out over.

-Wisco