Clowns To The Left Of Me, Jokers To The Right

I've been noticing a disturbing trend arising on the left, practically ever since Barack Obama received the nomination of the Democratic party:

Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned at signs that Barack Obama's national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on other important foreign policy issues.

The activists are uneasy not only about signs that both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates could be in the Obama Cabinet, but at reports suggesting that several other short-list candidates for top security posts backed the decision to go to war.

"Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning," said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of the 54-chapter Iraq Veterans Against the War.

To quote Captain Jack Sparrow when accused of cheating, "Pirate."

"Politician."

What makes this whinging particularly annoying are a few facts:

1) No one is really giving a good goddamn about the war anymore. It has become so little of an issue that the right wing warhawks, the guys who really want this war, are unilaterally declaring it is over.

Not that it matters much, of course, what a bunch of Cheeto-stained cowards who couldn't get up off their asses and pick up a gun and fight say, but the sentiment is appreciated by those of us who thought long ago the invasion was a horrible idea.

2) It's the economy, stupid.

And I'm not talking about just the stock market tanking or the housing meltdown or the impending depression that's sitting on top of Christmas like a fat bully.

Barack Obama sees what I see, and let me tell you, it's terrifying me.

I see 600 million angry young single Chinese men who don't have brides because of China's ill-conceived (pun intended) population control policies. I see 600 million angry young single Chinese men out of work for long stretches of time.

I see a half-billion starving people on the subcontinent of India and Pakistan, ripe fodder for Al Qaeda.

I see hundreds of millions of starving and angry Africans.

I see interest rates in Argentina of 30-50%.

In short, I see a lot of suffering and a lot of anger. Even change we can believe in only goes so far.

I'm not suggesting. I'm not hinting. I won't be as coy with this as I was with my stagflation predictions: we will be at war within the decade. History insists, and we are doomed to fail if we do not take this lesson to heart.

And since Barack Obama stands a very good chance of being President when that occurs, he needs to have a check on his ego around. He needs people around who are going to stand up and give him prudent counsel when war-like situations arise and help him determine which fights are worth going after and which we can avoid.

No one wants war, except a true warmonger. To call Hillary Clinton or Bob Gates, who has been surprisingly vocal in his assessments of the mess in Iraq, "warmongers" is hardly fair or accurate.

This is the hand we are dealt. The only alternative is to fold, and if we fold on this issue, Democrats may as well fold on everything else, because Republicans will run the show for millennia.

Demolition Man

People spoke, either admiringly or jealously, of Ronald Reagan as "the Teflon President," where corruption and scandal slipped off him like a fried egg from a skillet. It should be noted that the implication of the moniker is that Reagan was indeed a corrupt bastard whose lingering death was thoroughly justified, just as John "Teflon John" Gotti was among the most notorious gangsters this country has ever produced.

But far outclassing them all, I think, in terms of his Teflon coating is George W. Bush. To-wit:

Under pressure over impending impeachment charges, President Pervez Musharraf announced he would resign Monday, ending nearly nine years as the head of one of the United States’ most important allies in the campaign against terrorism.

By my count...Japan and England being among the largest coups... this now makes something like a half dozen world leaders who had closely allied themselves with Bush's Middle Eastern hegemonic ambitions who have now fallen on their swords partly because of it.

Yes, there are lingering corruption charges in Pakistan and Pakistan is not exactly a hotbed of good government, but Musharraf was considered a fairly benevolent leader prior to 2002, and was popular.

The moment he was basically blackmailed into partnering with Bush's ill-fated search for Osama bin Laden, his popularity began to spiral downward.

And yet, there's ol' Dumbya sitting there, just tearing pages off the calendar and packing boxes, waiting to leave office. Nothing seems to touch him despite the fact that he knew about the Plame affair, despite the fact he personally knew there were no WMDs in Iraq, despite the fact he received a Presidential Daily Briefing a month ahead of September 11, and did nothing,

This goes beyond minor internal corruption. This goes beyond the Constitutional violations of the Nixon administration. This certainly goes beyond consensual sex! This is the deliberate and negligent seditious behaviour of someone who at the kindest does not have his nation's best interests at heart, doesn't care, and at worst is raping the resources of this nation to benefit some private agenda.

That last alone ought to be an impeachable offense.

The trouble here now is that, between an unstable nuclear power, Pakistan, and an angry aggressive rival, Russia (Putin, who opposed the Iraq invasion, is still strongly in power. Wonder why...), Bush has left the fuse to the powder keg lying dangerously close to a sparking flame.

And it's getting warm in here...

(props to Memeorandum for tapping this)

Proving A Point

There's a curious dynamic involved in this story, one I haven't fully contemplated yet:

Iraqis returned to the streets of Baghdad after a curfew was lifted and the southern port city of Basra appeared quiet on Monday, a day after the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for his followers to stop fighting and in turn demanded concessions from Iraq’s government.

Mr. Sadr’s statement, released Sunday afternoon, came at the end of six days in which his Mahdi Army militia had held off an American-supported Iraqi assault on Basra.

OK, the most obvious bit of information we can glean from this story is that al-Sadr is establishing that he is firmly in control of the Shi'ite faction in Iraq. Is this a prelude to his taking over the parliament? Or worse? Is this a signal that Sayyid al-Sistani is preparing to rule over Iraq the way Ayatollahs in Iran have for decades, as "Expwert Jurist"?

After all, he's basically turned on, and then turned off, the faucet of violence, keeping American and British troops dancing in the background while he held off allied-armed Iraqi forces to a standstill.

Clearly, he wanted to demonstrate that the nation will dance to his tune.

He also demonstrated the abject impotence of the American-chosen president, Nuri Maliki, who apparently couldn't crush an uprising any more effectively than the American-led Coalition of the Bribed!

There is an allegory about the lion and the fly, which applies to Iraq: In a fight between a lion and a fly, the fly cannot land a killing blow, while the lion cannot fly.

So it goes with Iraq and the insurgency: we are fighting a fight that we cannot win, despite our overwhelming force, and the Shi'ites know this lion cannot fly.

The ironic thing about this is, this was a fight, and still is a fight, that we didn't have to fight. The sponsors behind this fight, the Iranians, are perhaps the most sophisticated democratic government in the area, just behind India. Yes, the Ayatollah in Iran has supreme power, but if you look at society, even Khameni hasn't been able to stifle all dissent, or make women wear the burqa, or...well, you choose the field, and Iran has advanced fairly far in it, comparatively speaking.

That's not to say we should be holding them up as a model of the Middle East we'd like to see, but we could try working with them to bring them into the fold, so to speak.

Ahmadinejad may come off as a fucking loon, but if you carefully look at the ripples that he sends out, there's a very deep logic to his insanity and it is very profitable to Iran and to its peer nations. And I have no doubt that he speaks for the Ayatollah.

Foreshadowed

Consider this a glimpse of things to come:

Heavy fighting has been raging in Basra as thousands of Iraqi troops battle Shia militias in the southern city.

At least 12 people have died in the operation, which is being overseen in Basra by Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki, a day after he vowed to "re-impose law".

[...]Oil-rich Basra is in the grip of a bitter turf war between armed groups, including the Mehdi Army, say analysts.

The Mehdi Army - which supports radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr - called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience.

Yea. Some "civil disobedience", huh?

Sadr declareda ceasefire last summer, and apparently went into hiding for the past seven months, only to pop up again Tuesday, calling on Iraqis, and particularly Shi'ites, to engage in civil disruptions if American "attacks" did not cease.

These attacks consisted of wide-scale arrests of Iraqis (apparently non-discriminatory) across Iraq in an attempt to round up militia members.

The lone bright spot in this story is that the bulk of the fighting is being done by Iraqis themselves, against other Iraqis. Allied forces are providing support and reconnaissance functions.

The New York Times is reporting that Sadr has attempted to negotiate with American and Iraqi leaders, but that those talks have broken down.

We're in the middle of this mess, and sadly, it looks like McCain's prediction of 100 years (which he will shortly scale back to fifty) of American presence in the country is not too far off the mark. The Koreas have had us for nearly sixty years, and they are not that much closer to resolution of their grievances and disputes.

We will, I think, be forced to leave a military presence, even as a policing presence, in Iraq for some time to come, and it really doesn't matter who was right or who was wrong about the war.

The bus, to borrow a phrase, has been driven into the ditch. This kind of story will be the template for stories to come out of Iraq for the next few generations, I suspect: Iraqi fighting Iraqi, with Americans trying and failing to talk them both down from the ledge. Civil disobedience will take the form of more bullets and less bluster.

To rattle sabers will be taken far more literally. You almost get the sense that Sadr hoped the American troops would be long gone by now, and figured there's no real reason to wait to take over the country, which would be an unacceptable resolution for America, which have pinned its feeble hopes on Maliki's government.

While McCain was wrong about Iran training Al Qaeda fighters, Shi'a warriors are most definitely allied with Iran, much like the Northern Ireland Catholics were allied with American Irish Catholics. That means money, influence, and weapons are at their disposal, possibly ad infinitum.

It would, of course, be a feather in Iran's cap to rule the nation that they once waged a terrible and terrifying war against.

Pundits on the left have, among others, have tried to paint Iraq's relevance to this election cycle, but I think the realpolitik is that all three remaining candidates would probably have to suck it up and accept our presence in Iraq until 2012, at least (something both Clinton and Obama have admitted to in debates).

Iraq will not be an issue in the campaign this year, not even as a retrospective review and mandate of George Bush's failures. The parry to any serious questioning about our involvement in Iraq would be "Yes, but..."

No use crying over spilled milk, I suppose, but you have to sit and wonder what we've lost, how much we've lost, in this foolish aggression of a few unprincipled men.

No Need To Explain

Iraq war numbers abound: five years; 4,000 American military deaths; 28,500 more (or fewer) troops; $5,000 per second; and X number of Iraqi military and civilian casualties -- where the X is unknown, at least here at home.

The numbers can't actually tell us what we should do, and they are all inhumanely impersonal. Despite whatever "success" has come from the surge, public support remains low. Five years seems so long, and 4,000 seems a number so extreme to the cause, and a war costing $5,000 per second seems so obscene, and gas is more than $3 a gallon, and our economy is now reeling. There are 224 days until Tuesday, Nov. 4.

Yesterday, four U.S. soldiers were killed when their vehicle in south Baghdad was hit by an IED, bringing the U.S. military death toll in Iraq to 4,000.

Bush's Final Budget

Bush's Final Budget. Sorry for repeating myself, but that sounded so delectable...

OK, so here it is: Bush's budget proposal for this final year of his circus administration:

President Bush’s final budget, a $3 trillion plan offered Monday that would continue his tax cuts and sharply reduce domestic spending, has little chance of surviving in a Democratic Congress. But the problems it lays out will survive and grow, presenting tough choices for the next administration.

How, for example, will the next president rein in the cost of retirement and health programs? What will he or she do about tax increases on Americans when Mr. Bush’s tax cuts expire at the end of 2010, or when the alternative minimum tax propels millions of taxpayers into higher brackets each year?

Beyond these familiar traps, how will a Republican president pay for further promised tax cuts or a Democratic president pay for a sweeping health care overhaul without increasing the red ink left by Mr. Bush?

Three trillion. By his own estimates, Bush projects a $470 billion deficit, which is higher than anything recorded previously, and that's before Iraq invasion spending!

This is a serious constraint that the next President will have to deal with. Even tho spending for the Iraq invasion is off-budget, so not reflected here, ending the invasion as soon as possible becomes imperative, because many of the incidental costs of that conflict are reflected in the departmental budget requests of agencies and cabinet offices as diverse as the Pentagon right down to the Department of the Interior (National Guardsmen have to be reimbursed from *somewhere* when they respond to disasters).

Fortunately, it's not as bad as Bush's budget paints. Bush has long had a reputation for being Chicken Little (if not just plain chicken) about a lot of things, trying to literally scare up support for dicey propositions and bizarre programs that conflict directly with national security, much less any rational modality of governance.

Discretionary spending, that is, non-military and non-mandated spending (which excludes Social Security) is less than three percent of the budget, which means we can't cut the education, welfare, and public works budgets any tighter than we already have. That means one of two places for the money to come from: Social Security or defense.

Assuming Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama end up president, you tell me: which gets slashed?

If you said defense, that's the right answer. And wrong answer. Wrong answer, since I have an idea that might help refresh the military, offer opportunity to working class Americans, and right a faltering economy before it's too late.

A few days ago, I off-handedly proposed as part of my NotPresident noncampaign, a real stimulus package that would help the American economy while de-militarizing our presence in the Middle East. In that package, I mentioned that we could take the savings from the Iraq invasion forces and put them to use here at home, rebuilding and mending and upgrading the infrastructure in America.

I have an additional thought: energy independence. Yesterday, as a one-off, I said that a good idea for creating a new economy based on renewable energy would be to offer a billion dollar prize.

Guess what institution would be offering that prize? If you guessed the Pentagon, you'd be right. Why the Pentagon? Why not the DoEnergy?

Accountability, for one thing: the Pentagon regularly handles budgets of this size and has in place a responsibility infrastructure that would have to be built into the Department of Energy.

More important, tho, is that the first applications of renewable energy in the real world would be defense-related, so we might as well let them perfect the technology before awarding the prize. After all, is there a better testing ground for the efficiencies of scale, redundancies and safeguards than in the chaos of even test battlefields?

I doubt it.

By combining the energy prize (maybe I'd call it the Gore Award) with the defense budget, we'd pretty much ensure that no Republican might come along to gut the budget for it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would welcome the job security, and the companies who would be applying for the competition could remain assured that politic donations and lobbying would have nearly zero influence on the outcome.

And we'd be beating plowshares into swords.

Would this solve our immediate economic problems? Probably not, but it might and it would ensure that $100 a barrel increases in the price oil would never trouble us again. People would have jobs, and those jobs would carry over to the new renewable energy companies that would spring up as this technology is leased for components, software, and engineering into new products.

Too, we'd create a viable, if not thriving, economy of companies that would be greening the infrastructure that the current energy economy has in place: reforesting mountaintop removal coal mines, cleaning up crude refinery sites, finding new uses for natural gas pipelines, and such like that.

Budget deficits represent challenges, but they also represent opportunities to change wasteful and irrational ways of the past, ways that have failed us now, and to move in a direction that makes sense for us and our children and grandchildren.

And we would hardly have to tinker with tax rates, and we'd take tax cuts off the table for decades.

Bush Got What He Wanted Out Of Bali

He delayed, ran down the clock, deferred, distracted and otherwise pushed off the tough decisions on global warming to the next shnook to sit in his chair:

NUSA DUA, Indonesia — The world’s faltering effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions got a new lease on life on Saturday, as delegates from 187 countries agreed to negotiate a new accord over the next two years — pushing the crucial debates about United States participation into the administration of a new American president.

(emphasis added) I should add that Bush also got India and China to agree that they would have to take "measurable steps" to reduce carbon emissions. Their concessions at Bali are tantamount to Bush saying he'll withdraw American troops from Iraq "as Iraqis stand up": meaningless, ambiguous and ultimately up to India and China to decide how and when to measure emissions.

So there will be two more years of "jaw, jaw, jaw," as Churchill might have put it, altho in this context, not approvingly I'm sure.

Can you imagine what might have happened in this country if, instead of wasting nearly a trillion dollars on a quixotic quest to quickly inflame the Iraqi quagmire, Bush had instead tackled global warming and climate change, if only for the protection and security of this nation?

If Osama bin Laden is truly bent on destroying the American way of life, he need only wait a few decades. In fact, he can claim credit for it, since he will have distracted this country at nearly its last possible chance to prevent a worldwide catastrophe that will level the entire global economy, if not the entire global power structure.

He might, indeed, have his caliphate after all, simply because Bush had not the wit, had not the capacity, had not even the horse sense, to close the barn door.

Despite Bush's flummoxed approach to foreign policy and to world leaders, the world itself still looks to the US for a lot. Like it or not, interventionist or not, America is a beacon of prosperity and freedom, so if we think a problem is serious enough to tackle (that doesn't involve invading another country and raping its sovereignty), the world will sit up and take notice.

Even China. Even India. Maybe especially China and India, since they are clearly modeling their future economies on our own. We were, after all, wildly successful in preaching the "benefits" of capitalism, while conveniently leaving out some of the shortfalls (to-wit, a real lack of accountability).

You know something? Guess what? This is going to require sacrifice from everyone but especially from those who can afford it the most, meaning us. Again, imagine that foolish trillion spent in a good cause, as a show of good faith, trying to implement reduced carbon technology for India, for China, for Brazil and Argentina and Venezuela.

In America.

Do you think we might have been taken seriously at Bali? Do you think there would have had to be arm-twisting to get nations to show up to Bush's climate summit next year (presumably featuring the next GOP nominee)?

A trillion dollars, "all in" as they say in poker, means either you're a particularly inept bluffer or you've got an inside flush: you're taking the game seriously.

But no, we live in this reality, the one where an incompetent boob was elected (yes, the elections might have been stolen, but they simply shouldn't have been that close to begin with). He raped and pillaged our economy, Iraq, and Afghanistan, while paying lip service to anything that really matters: health care, poverty, crises that affected millions of people.

One trillion dollars. I keep shaking my head at that.

Interesting Turn Of Phrase

Buried in the hoopla over last night's Congressional passage of the war funding bill (with the proviso that troops must return home by the end of 2008), came this little comment:

The measure angered the Bush administration. "This is for political posturing and to appease radical groups," chiefly MoveOn.org and Code Pink, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said yesterday.

"Radical groups"?

Is it a radical movement when, alongside Moveon.org, and Code Pink, you have "Gold Star Families For Peace"? Is Pat Buchanan now wearing tie-dye and flashing the peace sign? Ron Paul? Senator James Webb and Paul Craig Roberts are clearly subversives living in Chuck Hagel's basement, mixing up the "medicine"...

And is MoveOn truly anti-war? Many think not, given that they have backed off earlier demands of immediate troop withdrawals.

The attempt by the Bush administration to paint this issue as a fringe whine is specious to the point of ridiculous. 61% of Americans agree with the timetable as laid out in the bill. That 61% includes 63% of Republicans, further, the number of self-identifying Republicans in this country has plummeted since the 2004 election, so it's a bigger chunk of a closer-knit core of believers. After all, these numbnuts buy into Mitt Romney as the most conservative of all the GOP presidential candidates. Mitt. Romney. Of Massachussetts.

If only we had a press corps unafraid of this administration to hold its feet to the fire and fire back at Perky Dana Perino, but if we had that in the first place, maybe this ill-conceived, poorly executed bad idea would never have occured in the first place.

You might recall that Democrats had been itching for Republicans to bring on a filibuster. Probably not going to happen, now:

Senate Republican leaders said they will allow a vote on the House bill, but only if they can offer their own version: a $70 billion package with no strings attached. As of late yesterday, no agreement had been reached between Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and his GOP counterpart, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Senate aides on both sides said that the debate is likely to continue into December, although Republicans are expected to stand aside eventually to give Bush a chance to veto the bill.

You'll notice: $20 billion dollars more than the President requested and no strings attached. There's a bit of political theatre afoot, in that Bush can later criticize Democrats (should this bill pass) of overspending us into a deeper hole while getting more than enough money to fund the war for an additional month or so. Not very subtle. I'm surprised at McConnell, but maybe he's running out of tricks in the flea circus.

Given the likelihood of a veto, and that Reid doesn't have 60 votes to wrangle over a potential filibuster, what will happen? Will the war continue to be funded? Maybe not this time:

If Democrats hold together, they can simply refuse to approve any new funding for the war unless Bush and the Republicans agree to their terms. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid insists that that's how it's going to be this time, sort of: If Bush won't agree to funding tied to a timetable, Congress won't approve any new funding -- this year. But that doesn't mean that the war will end; it just means that the Pentagon will have to shuffle money from budget to budget until early next year, when the Democrats will surely cave once again lest they be accused -- and they'll be accused anyway -- of " pulling the rug out from under our troops."

OK, it's small potatoes to defund the war for a month and make the Pentagon scramble a little to shuffle money around, but it's a bit more than a symbolic gesture, should Reid follow through with it.

It could be a calculated gamble to see if the anti-invasion sentiment of the 61% is as strong as the polls indicate it is, or if the American people are just tired of this nonsense and seek an easy way out. If by delaying funding for a month or so without actually pulling money away, the Republicans and their orc minions in the mainstream media can make the "Defeatocrats" label stick such that people switch positions away from ending the invasion, then Reid can capitulate, and deflect that charge with plenty of time left before the elections.

If, however, they fail, it may embolden Reid enough to take the bull by the horns and yank funding outright. Remember, he might not be able to survive a veto on positive change, but he sure as hell can make sure negative change doesn't get past his Senate.

Meanwhile, 100,000 plus American soldiers sit in harm's way waiting for someone to save them...

Opportunity Costs. A Lot.

You are going to hear a lot about this story in the next few days:

The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing nearly double the amount previously thought, according to a report set to be released by Congress.

Democrats say the wars have cost $1.5 trillion - almost twice the requested $804bn (£402bn) - because of "hidden costs", the Washington Post reports.

That figure would amount to $20,000 for an average US family of four, it adds.

And some of the figures cited in the report were labelled speculative by funding experts, the Post says.

Among the indicators contributing to the higher cost of the conflicts are higher oil costs and payments to war veterans.

Those are the actual costs, mind you, hidden but real and not budgeted for. The Democrats who are issuing the report today estimate that, by the invasion's end, those will more than double.

But what's not talked about, the costs that aren't covered, are the opportunity costs.

When a business makes a decision regarding a major investment, one thing it takes into account is what else they could do with the resources they need to commit to that investment, how much money they have to subtract from other investments, and what those investments might yield instead.

These are called "opportunity costs." If the new investment produces a greater return, then the new investment is made. If it takes too much from other opportunities and doesn't produce enough, it is not made.

Think about the Iraq invasion in this regard: how many National Guardsmen would have been available for Katrina, or the recent rash of California wildfires? Would the I-35 bridge have collapsed and killed as many if the NTSB had been fully funded to even their 2000 levels? How many people have lost vital services because of budget cutbacks to pay for this debacle?

$750 billion, the actual direct costs attributed to Iraq and Afghanistan, buys a whole lot, but wait, there's more! Money makes money, so that $750 billion dollars isn't just $750 billion, it's $750 billion plus whatever return that money would have gotten. Let's say that $10,000 of that money went to help someone who was let go from work in 2002. That person finally lands a job (thanks to the fact that the government is spending domestically and not lining Halliburton's pockets), and makes $30,000 a year, paying about $14000 a year in taxes (including payroll taxes).

Money earned back in the first year = $4,000, or 40% return on that investment. Now multiply that by the 20 million or so who were out of work at that time and you begin to grasp the magnitude of what was lost, as people rolled off the unemployment lists and still couldn't find work, yet weren't paying taxes (but still using other services, like say that bridge on I-35).

And so on. Science funding, medical research, renewable energy development, education...hell, even the value of the dollar, have all been severly handicapped by the Bush administrations ill-advised...OK, idiotic venture into Iraq.

In 2004, The Center For American Progress published a report detailing the opportunity costs of the Iraq invasion to that point. As of the date of that report, CAP estimated that the $144 billion pledged could have financed at least 16 projects that could have secured the American homeland far more effectively than this lunacy.

Well, here's what it would be now:

Cost of the War in Iraq

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To see more details, click here.

(h/t John P., who does a masterful job of detailing precisely how to fit all this into perspective, so give him so love and go read his blog for that...I'll wait...)

Mind you, that's still just the actual recorded figures of monies laid out (or budgeted) for the invasion. Double that for the hidden costs today's report will detail.

Now triple that figure and you can get a clear picture of what this invasion is taking out of America: $5 trillion dollars, roughly.

The current nation debt is "only" $10 trillion. If you ever thought this invasion was a good idea, and if someone had presented that number to you...half our current national debt, which means we'll be paying just for the invasion alone into the 22nd Century, would you have thought it was worth it?

I didn't, and still wouldn't.