BTC News ..
Worst National Security Administration Ever: Wall Street Edition
Blaming our country’s woes exclusively on the people who have most directly wrought them—Bush, Cheney, torture maven David Addington et al—becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the refusal by Democratic party leaders to confer accountability, let alone make any attempt to visit some sort of necessarily inadequate justice, upon the administration.
The party’s presidential candidate, who agreeably opposes impeaching Bush and Cheney and seems no more than mildly interested in examining the genesis of our sorrows should he and his party consolidate control of the two elective branches, has just come out foursquare in favor of expanding the reach of a government that already has its national security tentacles embedded in what should be some very uncomfortable places, and he has endorsed at least two Congressional figures—practicing war lover Joe Lieberman, who is receiving favorable mention as a possible Republican vice-presidential candidate, over the anti-occupation Ned Lamont in 2006, and reactionary Georgia representative John Barrow over his progressive primary opponent, Regina Thomas, this year—who represent the antithesis of Barack Obama’s watchwords, “hope” and “change”. To continue the cephalopod analogy, he seems fully sympathetic to the notion of redaction as a survival technique, if one takes “survival” to mean “convenience”.
Obama did not, however, lay the keystone of a national security state, or invade Iraq, or greenlight torture, or threaten to carpet bomb Iran, or minister to the armed forces with a sledgehammer, or weaken the economy to the point that it has become its own threat to our collective security, and neither did other Vichy Democrats such as Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and dozens of other administration enablers. They only helped; anything more than to shave their heads and shun them could be seen as an overreaction.
Obama, like Hillary Clinton and most other Democrats, has endorsed the idea of expanding the size of the Army and Marines by some 100,000 bodies. Unfortunately, so much equipment has been worn out, damaged or destroyed in service to the occupation of Iraq and the escalating war in Afghanistan that the military, primarily the two ground-bound branches but not excluding the Air Force and Navy, cannot afford to refurbish and replace mechanical goods at the same time as they embark on a costly and time consuming expansion of flesh and blood ones. Accordingly, sentiment at the Pentagon is running high in favor not of increasing the number of ground-bound combat troops, but of trimming the human ranks in favor of resuscitating the mechanical ones.
The obvious stumbling block to a streamlining is the military’s inability to maintain the occupation and prosecute the war with fewer troops under arms. The improvements in Iraq’s internal security, which have led to steep declines in kidnappings and violent occupation-related Iraqi deaths, from apocalyptic to merely horrifying—500 each month of the latter, down from as many as 1,500 or more in the salad days, and perhaps two dozen daily of the former, down from who knows how many—are dependent upon either a stable number of US troops and mercenaries, at present in the neighborhood of 150,000 and 50,000, respectively, or an actual functioning central government with functional Iraqi police and military organizations, prospects which seem as far beyond the horizon as ever.
In Afghanistan, where the Taliban and other anti-occupation forces appear to have taken a much longer view of the conflict than have the US and NATO, the increasingly petulant US cries for help from our once-again allies are a reflection of our own inability to bolster our own forces without dipping into that immutable number in Iraq. In both instances, expanding the Army and Marine Corps, a process that will cost upwards of $100 billion over perhaps five years—coincidentally, about what analysts say the Pentagon needs to recover from the equipment deficit—will come too late to have much impact on situations that we can reasonably guess will have deteriorated significantly by then. (The Pentagon, with characteristic modesty, places equipment repair and replacement costs closer to $50 billion.)
The Bush administration begat these problems but they now belong, for practical purposes, exclusively to the Pentagon and the next administration, which means that nothing will be done to address them for at least another six months, if then. Obama has made no coherent pledge to decrease the number of Americans under arms in Iraq, and has indicated his desire to increase the number in Afghanistan. John McCain has not been coherent about much of anything other than his cheery willingness to splash more blood whenever and wherever he can, including but not limited to those countries. Something, either the government’s and military’s commitments to the occupation and war or their shared allergy to a military draft, has to give.
In exchange, then, for whatever dubious accomplishments they can point to in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration have left us with a military that has been poised on the brink of physical collapse for several years, and that, even barring any additional misadventures, will require at least as many years more to recover; not necessarily a bad thing philosophically, but bad enough for the people who serve in it and in the unlikely event that we need it for staving off the invading Venezuelan hordes or some other, equally legitimate purpose.
Meanwhile, the administration have, according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, embarked upon an increasingly rich and expensive variety of warlike moves against Iran, using CIA and special forces personnel inside Iran and funding various Iranian dissident groups, including one on the state department’s list of terrorist organizations—an exercise, whether aimed at genuinely destabilizing the Iranian regime or at provoking it into something approaching a reason to obliviate the country, or just for the hell of it, that might make slightly more sense, using whatever logic is required for it to make any sense at all, were not oil prices already spiking upward in the wake of the Iraq invasion and US threats against Iran, and were most of our ground forces not playing hostage in neighboring Iraq, surrounded by 20 million Shiite coreligionists along with Iran’s allies in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Much of Hersh’s story is not really news—most people who are aware of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the group designated as terrorists, know that the US gave them safe haven in Iraq after the invasion, and assumed that the US has been supporting them in operations against the Iranian government—and some of it is questioned by people of experience in the region. Hersh says that among the groups being employed by the administration are some that bear a startling resemblance to al Qaeda, but Laura Rozen notes that journalists who have spent time with the organizations in question have seen no signs of the new weapons or wealth that one could expect to result from US support, and says her sources suggest that the threats against Iran, and whatever support the US is providing to the regime’s internal opponents, reflect only an attempt to keep the ayatollahs off balance as the administration runs out the clock until Iran, like Iraq and Afghanistan, becomes someone else’s problem. One can only hope that Rozen’s account is the more accurate, as our last formal relationship with violent Sunni fundamentalists has not resolved to our long-term benefit.
Although the degree is disputed, no one worth reading argues that invading and occupying Iraq, and the debt incurred in service of the adventure, has not had an unfortunate impact on the US economy. Unemployment, which is far higher than the official statistics admit, and the credit meltdown, which is likewise more Dali-esque than most authorities admit, are not direct consequences of the occupation, unless one takes the housing and mortgage bubbles as reflections of our collective desire to be happy and not worry about the kinds of hell we’re visiting upon Iraqis, but other costs are more visibly associated with it.
Among those costs is oil. The fourfold rise in the price of oil since January 2003, to this point heroically absorbed by consumers, can be ascribed at least in part to the invasion and the subsequent rollout of the campaign to demonize Iran. Inflation and rising demand account for only a portion, larger or smaller depending upon which maven is speaking, of the rise. More expensive gasoline isn’t necessarily a bad thing, leading as it has to a growing conservation evangelism, a practice that vice president and Halliburton lobbyist Dick Cheney once dismissed as a private virtue but “not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” But absent that sound, comprehensive energy policy, which eight years of the Bush administration has deliberately failed to produce, conservation is an act of desperation, and high gasoline prices are a drag on everyone’s economy who isn’t an oil company executive.
Increased defense spending is a drag as well, in both senses. Unlike spending on education, research or infrastructure, or even health care and other entitlement programs, government investment in products that represent the epitome of planned obsolescence—ones that blow up the very first time you use them—does not offer a high rate of return. In peaceful days, when defense dollars are used primarily as welfare for defense contractors, the return is better but not great. During wartime, every defense dollar is taxed by higher personnel costs; what money soldiers and their families inject into the economy is eroded by the expense of caring for the wounded and paying for the dead. A million troops have passed through Iraq, and fully a third or more of them have been killed, wounded, or traumatized to the point of requiring treatment, some for the rest of their lives, most with federal funds that will have to be borrowed and on which interest will have to be paid. A few years ago, economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimated the true cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation to be between $2 trillion and $3 trillion, an estimate that they increased to at least $3 trillion in their new book, and now say may approach $4 trillion-$5 trillion instead.
That’s a lot of money, even by Everett Dirksen’s “a billion here and a billion there” standard. Distributed across the US population today, it amounts to $13,000-$16,000 for everyone, man, woman and child, which would make one hell of an economic stimulus check even on the low end. Invested in the sort of government programs which return three or four dollars for each one spent, it would inject $12 trillion or more into the economy over a period of 30 or 40 years. National security depends on our ability to remain intellectually and commercially competetive with the rest of the world; the ability to do that depends upon the economy, which depends in turn upon the well being of our population and our infrastructure. Both are suffering, and will continue to suffer, in a variety of ways and for many years, from the absence of all that money—an absence that will inspire considerably more fondness than now if Cheney has his way and we actually attack Iran.
Although not by name, Rozen’s response to Hersh’s story includes an estimation that Condoleezza Rice’s tenure at the state department has served to blunt the influence of Dick Cheney, and that of the other violent demagogues in the administration, upon Bush with respect to Iran. For that to be true, Rice, who unaccountably continues to receive mention as a good option for filling out the McCain ticket, would have to be considerably more effective in her current post than in the previous one, where she presided over the intersection of diplomacy, defense and intelligence that led us into the hole from which she is now presumably trying to dig us out. The surprising deletion, presided over by Rice deputy Christopher Hill, of North Korea from the axis of countries we would probably attack if we weren’t so fully and bloodily occupied elsewhere lends credence to the idea, but Rice’s continuing insistence on the profound evilness of Iran’s leaders suggests that if she has become less amorphous, it’s nothing that a good dunking in a vat of neoconservative bile can’t fix. And it would be profoundly out of character for Bush and Cheney to avoid leaving the next president, especially if that looks to be Obama, with something other than a fait accompli regarding Iran.
In addition to breaking the Army and the economy, the Bush administration have broken the Constitution, something the courts have made hesitant attempts to remedy in the absence of any cohesive objections from congressional Democrats or, recently, from the party’s putative leader. One of Obama’s least successful primary opponents, Chris Dodd, recently gave voice to a classic Senate floor rant in response to the Obama-supported bill granting immunity to the behemoth telecommunications firm that broke the law, violated the Constitution, in service to the Bush administration. The closing of his speech was an indictment aimed squarely at his collaborationist Democratic colleagues, and is well worth repeating here.
My father, Senator Tom Dodd, was the number two American prosecutor at the famous Nuremberg trials. And I have never, never forgotten the example he set.
As Justice Robert Jackson said in his opening statement at Nuremberg: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
Mr. President, what is the tribute that Power owes to Reason?
That America stands for a transcendent idea.
The idea that laws should rule, not men.
The idea that the Constitution does not get suspended for vengeance.
The idea that this nation should never tailor its eternal principles to the conflict of the moment, because if we did, we would be walking in the footsteps of the enemies we despised.
The tribute that Power owes to Reason is due today. I know that we can find the strength to pay it. And if we can’t? We will all have to answer for it.
There’s a famous military recruiting poster that comes to mind. A man is sitting in an easy chair with his son and daughter on his lap, in some future after the war has ended. His daughter is asking him, “Daddy, what did you do in the war?” And his face is shocked and shamed, because he knows he did nothing.
My daughters, Grace and Christina, are six and three. They are growing up in a time of two great conflicts: one between our nation and its enemies, and another, between what is best and worst in our American soul. And someday soon, I know I am going to hear that question: “What did you do?” I want, more than anything else, to give the right answer.
That question is coming for every single one of us in this body. Every single one of us will be judged by a jury from whom there’s no hiding: our sons, our daughters, our grandchildren. Someday soon, they’ll read in their textbooks the story of a great nation, one that threw down tyrants and oppressors for two centuries; one that rid the world of Nazism and Soviet communism; one that proved that great strength can serve great virtue, that right can truly make might.
And then they will read how, in the early years of the 21st century, that nation lost its way.
We do not have the power to strike that chapter. No, Mr. President—we can’t go back.
We can’t un-destroy the CIA’s interrogation tapes. We can’t un-pass the Military Commissions Act. We can’t un-speak Alberto Gonzales’s disgraceful testimony. We can’t un-torture innocent people. And perhaps, sadly, shamefully, we cannot stop retroactive immunity. We can’t un-do anything that has been done in the last six years for the cause of lawlessness and fear.
We cannot blot out that chapter. But we can begin the next one, even today. Let its first words read: “Finally, in June 2008, the Senate said: ‘Enough.’”
The Senate, of course, has yet to say, “Enough”, although the ghost of a chance remains once the bill in question is put to a vote after, ironically, the July 4th holiday, the one where we celebrate our freedom and, whether spoken or not, its fount, the Constitution. All indications are that when the Senate reconvenes, its members will do as the House has done, and as Barack Obama now recommends, which is to approve legislation that at its heart undermines the principle, which now appears to be little more than a conceit, that legislation, and by unfortunate implication legislators, are an essential element of governance.
By which I mean, “What Chris Dodd said.”
This Pentagon file photo, obtained by The Associated Press, shows Sgt. Michael Smith, left, with his dog Marco, menacing a detainee at an unspecified date in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq.
LOL MARK WAS THAT YOU?? at approximately 21:40 they put a brain on you and you started twinkling I think. Hahahaha.
Good for you, Mark. Good for you!
Technically, you are absolutely right. I suppose that is a good argument you can make when you're stopped at any one of the growing number of arbitrary checkpoints across the country, as they snatch you out of the car and taser you as they drag you to a patrol car and haul you downtown. By the time you get before a judge, the charges (bogus all) against you will be so overwhelming that you won't escape scot-free.
Obviously you have not had a run-in with the "law" lately. I have. So have thousands of others. Law enforcement and the courts play by the Patriot Act "rules," not by the Constitutional prohibitions. I heard one judge, in a Larry Becraft trial, clearly say he wouldn't allow the Constitution to be quoted in his courtroom. I was there and personally heard that.
Former Texas attorney Harmon Taylor resigned the bar after losing his case before the court of appeals on the Timothy McVeigh case, when they ruled that the Constitution "is not admissible evidence of law." The public was told the 30-day delay in McVeigh's execution was because they had found some misplaced FBI files they wanted McVeigh's lawyers to see, but that delay was caused by Harmon's jurisdictional challenge based on the Constitution's requirement that wrongful death is a matter over which the State has exclusive jurisdiction, when it occurs anywhere within the state other than federally-owned property. The Murrah "Federal" building was OWNED by Oklahoma City and only portions of it were LEASED to the feds.
If I have $100 but you have it locked in your safety deposit box and won't give me access to it, is it really mine?
Fred
Public perception is worth its weight in gold. If the public is led to believe that "Ron Paul can't win," can he win? If the public is led to believe that there are "only three candidates," can Ron Paul win? If the public is led to believe that Congress voted away the Bill of Rights, do you expect the public to demand enforcement of the Bill of Rights?
But we are a nation of laws, not a nation of wishes or illusions painted by TV broadcasters and commentators. So, yes, Fred, in the hypothetical example you gave, the $100 is still yours, and if I won't surrender it then you have a right to take action to get it. My decision cannot change your entitlement.
If a judge or police officer misbehaves, he doesn't have any effect on the law. The law stands until legally changed. Americans should know this well, so that at every turn we will object loudly and boldly to illegal government behavior.