| Author | Message | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 3:30 pm Post subject: GOP hasn't forgiven Paul for opposing Iraq war |
| GOP hasn't forgiven Paul for opposing Iraq war
Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 03/09/2008
Joseph Reisert's column (Feb. 22) on the "radical world of Ron Paul" tells more about himself and the state of modern conservatism within the Republican Party than it does about the principled apostle of limited, constitutional government. Imagine, a political science professor teaching college students at a high-priced school that a politician "is not a serious" candidate because he is "principled."
Apparently a statesman who is true to his word and takes his political principles from the real "Greatest Generation," those remarkable men in American history who include Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, cannot be taken seriously by a generally leftist academic culture and their parrots in the monolithic mainstream media, including the neo-con-biased Fox News.
The real problem: Paul's fellow GOP colleagues have never forgiven him for always opposing the Iraq war. The arrogant and ambitious will pardon any sin if you are wrong but will not forgive anyone who has been proven right. That makes them look too much the fool. Most Americans now agree with Paul. So much for "compromise" in modern politics.
Paul's problem is the same one that plagued former Democrat Ronald Reagan: He really hasn't changed but his party has. Reagan, a conservative New Dealer, saw his party converted into a democratic socialist regime. Paul has seen the GOP degenerate into another big government warfare/welfare party whose leading nominee's presidential campaign theme is "Invade the World, Invite the World."
Republicans: Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 9:02 pm Post subject: |
| Excellent post, JD.. Like he (we) gives a damn about what the neoconned Republican party thinks about such.. And that 'surge' is going so well too!:
US: recent Iraq attacks not a trend By BRADLEY BROOKS, Associated Press Writer
Sun Mar 9, 12:31 PM ET
The U.S. military said Sunday it does not believe a recent wave of deadly attacks in Baghdad reflects a trend toward an overall increase in violence.
Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the military spokesman, said a wave of horrific violence, including a single attack on Thursday that killed 68 people in Baghdad, must be placed in perspective.
You have to "look historically at what happened in the last year to put in perspective what has happened in one week or two weeks in Baghdad," Smith said.
Violence around Iraq has dropped by about 60 percent in the past nine months, due mostly to an influx of thousands of U.S. troops, a cease-fire called by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and a decision by tens of thousands of Sunnis to join forces with the U.S.
"On any given day, al-Qaida in Iraq and other extremist groups are still very much disposed to handing out violence indiscriminately," Smith said, adding that "I wouldn't look at the last two weeks as an increase or trend" toward rising violence.
Thursday's attack occurred in Baghdad's predominantly Shiite Karradah neighborhood, one of the capital's most vibrant commercial districts and a stronghold for the country's most powerful Shiite political party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.
Despite the attack targeting Shiites, Smith noted that al-Sadr and the majority of his Mahdi army continue to abide by their cease-fire, choosing "path of political and nonviolent ways."
He also said Iran continues to play a destabilizing role in Iraq, despite promises by its government to help Iraq reach peace.
"It would appear that inside Iran there are still groups and elements" who are training, financing and supplying weapons to "criminal elements" inside Iraq," he said.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who made a landmark visit to Iraq last week, has denied the U.S. allegations and insisted that the U.S. presence is what fuels violence in Iraq and the Mideast region as a whole. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 9:15 pm Post subject: |
| Iraq's Deeply Tragic Future
By Scott Ritter
Any analysis of the current state of the ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq that relied solely on the U.S. government, the major candidates for president or the major media outlets in the United States for information would be hard pressed to find any bad news. In a State of the Union address which had everything except a "Mission Accomplished" banner flying in the background, President Bush all but declared victory over the insurgency in Iraq. His recertification of the success of the so-called surge has prompted the Republican candidates to assume a cocky swagger when discussing Iraq. They embrace the occupation and speak, without shame or apparent fear of retribution, of an ongoing presence in that war-torn nation. Their Democratic counterparts have been less than enthusiastic in their criticism of the escalation. And the media, for the most part, continue their macabre role as cheerleaders of death, hiding the reality of Iraq deep inside stories that build upon approving headlines derived from nothing more than political rhetoric. The war in Iraq, we're told, is virtually over. We only need "stay the course" for 10 more years.
This situation is troublesome in the extreme. The collective refusal of any constituent in this complicated mix of political players to confront Bush on Iraq virtually guarantees that it will be the Bush administration, and not its successor, that will dictate the first year (or more) of policy in Iraq for the next president. It also ensures that the debacle that is the Bush administration's overarching Middle East policy of regional transformation and regime change in not only Iraq but Iran and Syria will continue to go unchallenged. If the president is free to pursue his policies, it could lead to direct military intervention in Iran by the United States prior to President Bush's departure from office or, failing that, place his successor on the path toward military confrontation. At a time when every data point available certifies (and recertifies) the administration's actions in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere (including Afghanistan) as an abject failure, America collectively has fallen into a hypnotic trance, distracted by domestic economic problems and incapable, due to our collective ignorance of the world we live in, of deciphering the reality on the ground in the Middle East.
Rather than offering a word-for-word renouncement of the president's rosy assertions concerning Iraq, I will instead initiate a process of debunking the myth of American success by doing that which no politician, current or aspiring, would dare do: predict the failure of American policy in Iraq. With the ink on the newspapers parroting the president's words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in view of the "success" of the "surge," but rather holding at current levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the reality that the statistical justification of "surge success," namely the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell, the equivalent of a human suffering from a sucking chest wound, its lungs collapsed and its life blood spilling unchecked onto the ground. The "surge" never addressed the underlying reasons for Iraq's post-Saddam suffering, and as such never sought to heal that which was killing Iraq. Instead, the "surge" offered little more than a cosmetic gesture, covering the wounds of Iraq with a bandage which shielded the true extent of the damage from outside view while doing nothing to save the victim.
Iraq is dying; soon Iraq will be dead. True, there will be a plot of land in the Middle East which people will refer to as Iraq. But any hope of a resurrected homogeneous Iraqi nation populated by a diverse people capable of coexisting in peace and harmony is soon to be swept away forever. Any hope of a way out for the people of Iraq and their neighbors is about to become a victim of the "successes" of the "surge" and the denial of reality. The destruction of Iraq has already begun. The myth of Kurdish stability-born artificially out of the U.S.-enforced "no-fly zones" of the 1990s, sustained through the largess of the Oil-for-Food program (and U.S.-approved sanctions sidestepped by the various Kurdish groups in Iraq) and given a Frankenstein-like lease on life in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and occupation-is rapidly unraveling. Like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, present-day Iraqi Kurdistan has been exposed as an amalgam of parts incompatible not only with each other but the region as a whole.
Ongoing Kurdish disdain for the central authority in Baghdad has led to the Kurds declaring their independence from Iraqi law (especially any law pertaining to oil present on lands they control). The reality of the Kurds' quest for independence can be seen in their support of the Kurdish groups, in particular the PKK, that desire independence from Turkey. The sentiment has not been lost on their Turkish neighbors to the north, resulting in an escalation of cross-border military incursions which will only expand over time, further destabilizing Kurdish Iraq. Lying dormant, and unmentioned, is the age-old animosity between the two principle Kurdish factions in Iraq, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). As recently as 1997, these two factions were engaged in a virtual civil war against one another. The strains brought on by the present unraveling have these two factions once again vying for position inside Iraq, making internecine conflict all but inevitable. The year 2008 will bring with it a major escalation of Turkish military operations against northern Iraq, a strategic break between the Kurdish factions there and with the central government of Baghdad, and the beginnings of an all-out civil war between the KDP and PUK.
The next unraveling of the "surge" myth will be in western Iraq, where the much applauded "awakening" was falling apart even as Bush spoke. I continue to maintain that there is a hidden hand behind the Sunni resistance that operates unseen and uncommented on by the United States and its erstwhile Iraqi allies operating out of the Green Zone in Baghdad. The government of Saddam Hussein never formally capitulated, and indeed had in place plans for ongoing active resistance against any occupation of Iraq. In October 2007 the Iraqi Baath Party held its 13th conference, in which it formally certified one of Saddam's vice presidents, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, as the supreme leader of the Sunni resistance.
The United States' embrace of the "awakening" will go down in the history of the Iraq conflict as one of the gravest strategic errors made in a field of grave errors. The U.S. military in Iraq has never fully understood the complex interplay between the Sunni resistance, al-Qaida in Iraq, and the former government of Saddam Hussein. Saddam may be dead, but not so his plans for resistance. The massive security organizations which held sway over Iraq during his rule were never defeated, and never formally disbanded. The organs of security which once operated as formal ministries now operate as covert cells, functioning along internal lines of communication which are virtually impenetrable by outside forces. These security organs gave birth to al-Qaida in Iraq, fostered its growth as a proxy, and used it as a means of sowing chaos and fear among the Iraqi population.
The violence perpetrated by al-Qaida in Iraq is largely responsible for the inability of the central government in Baghdad to gain any traction in the form of unified governance. The inability of the United States to defeat al-Qaida has destroyed any hope of generating confidence among the Iraqi population in the possibility of stability emerging from an ongoing American occupation. But al-Qaida in Iraq is not a physical entity which the United States can get its hands around, but rather a giant con game being run by Izzat al-Douri and the Sunni resistance. Because al-Qaida in Iraq is derived from the Sunni resistance, it can be defeated only when the Sunni resistance is defeated. And the greatest con game of them all occurred when the Sunni resistance manipulated the United States into arming it, training it and turning it against the forces of al-Qaida, which it controls. Far from subduing the Sunni resistance by Washington's political and military support of the "awakening," the United States has further empowered it. It is almost as if we were arming and training the Viet Cong on the eve of the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War.
Keeping in mind the fact that the Sunni resistance, led by al-Douri, operates from the shadows, and that its influence is exerted more indirectly than directly, there are actual al-Qaida elements in Iraq which operate independently of central Sunni control, just as there are Sunni tribal elements which freely joined the "awakening" in an effort to quash the forces of al-Qaida in Iraq. The diabolical beauty of the Sunni resistance isn't its ability to exert direct control over all aspects of the anti-American activity in Sunni Iraq, but rather to manipulate the overall direction of activity through indirect means in a manner which achieves its overall strategic aims. The Sunni resistance continues to use al-Qaida in Iraq as a useful tool for seizing the strategic focus of the American military occupiers (and their Iraqi proxies in the Green Zone), as well as controlling Sunni tribal elements which stray too far off the strategic course (witness the recent suicide bomb assassination of senior Sunni tribal leaders). 2008 will see the collapse of the Sunni "awakening" movement, and a return to large-scale anti-American insurgency in western Iraq. It will also see the continued viability of al-Qaida in Iraq in terms of being an organization capable of wreaking violence and dictating the pace of American military involvement in directions beneficial to the Sunni resistance and detrimental to the United States.
One of the spinoffs of the continued success of the Sunni resistance is the focus it places on the inability of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad to actually govern. The U.S. decision to arm, train and facilitate the various Sunni militias in Iraq is a de facto acknowledgement that the American occupiers have lost confidence in the high-profile byproduct of the "purple finger revolution" of January 2005. The sham that was that election has produced a government trusted by no one, even the Shiites. The ongoing unilateral cease-fire imposed by the Muqtada al-Sadr on his Mahdi Army prevented the outbreak of civil war between his movement and that of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and its militia, the Badr Brigade.
When Saddam's security forces dissolved on the eve of the fall of Baghdad in March 2003, the security organs which had been tasked with infiltrating the Shiite community for the purpose of spying on Shiites were instead instructed to embed themselves deep within the structures of that community. Both the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade are heavily infiltrated with such sleeper elements, which conspire to create and exploit fractures between these two organizations under the age-old adage of divide and conquer. A strategic pause in the conflict between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military on the one hand and the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade on the other has served to strengthen the hand of the Mahdi Army by allowing time for it to rearm and reorganize, increasing its efficiency as a military organization all the while its political opposite, the SCIRI-dominated central Iraqi government, continues to falter.
Further exacerbating the situation for the American occupiers of Iraq is the ongoing tension created by the war of wills between the United States and Iran. The Sunni resistance has no love for the Shiite theocracy in Tehran, or its proxies in Iraq, and views creating a rift between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade as a strategic imperative on the road to a Sunni resurgence. Any U.S. military strike against Iran will bring with it the inevitable Shiite backlash in Iraq. The Shiite forces that emerge as the most independent of the American occupier will be, in the minds of the Sunni resistance, the most capable of winning the support of the Shiites of Iraq. Given the past record of cooperation between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni resistance, and the ongoing antipathy between Sunnis and SCIRI, there can be little doubt which Shiite entity the Sunnis will side with when it comes time for a decisive conflict between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade, and 2008 will be the year which witnesses such a conflict.
The big loser in all of this, besides the people of Iraq, is of course the men and women of the armed forces of the United States. Betrayed by the Bush administration, abandoned by Congress and all but forgotten by a complacent American population and those who are positioning themselves for national leadership in the next administration, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who so proudly wear the uniform of the United States continue to fight and die, kill and be maimed in a war which was never justified and long ago lost its luster. Played as pawns in a giant game of three-dimensional chess, these brave Americans find themselves being needlessly sacrificed in a game where there can be no winner, only losers.
The continued ambivalence of the American population as a whole toward the war in Iraq, perhaps best manifested by the superficiality of the slogan "Support the Troops," all the while remaining ignorant of what the troops are actually doing, has led to a similar amnesia among politicians all too willing to allow themselves to seek political advantage at the expense of American life and treasure. January 2008 cost the United States nearly 40 lives in Iraq. The current military budget is unprecedented in its size, and doesn't even come close to paying for ongoing military operations in Iraq. The war in Iraq has bankrupted Americans morally and fiscally, and yet the American public continues to shake the hands of aspiring politicians who ignore Iraq, pretending that the blood which soaks the hands of these political aspirants hasn't stained their own. In the sick kabuki dance that is American politics, this refusal to call a spade a spade is deserving of little more than disdain and sorrow.
While the American people, politicians and media may remain mute on the reality of Iraq, I won't. There is no such thing as a crystal ball which enables one to see clearly into the future, and I am normally averse to making sweeping long-term predictions involving a topic as fluid as the ongoing situation in Iraq. At the risk of being wrong (and, indeed, I hope very much that I am), I will contradict the rosy statements of the president in his State of the Union address and will throw down a gauntlet in the face of ongoing public and media ambivalence by predicting that 2008 will be the year the "surge" in Iraq is exposed as a grand debacle. The cosmetic bandage placed over the gravely wounded Iraq will fall off, and the damaged body that is Iraq will continue its painful decline toward death.
If there is any winner in all of this it will be the Sunni resistance, or at least its leadership hiding in the shadow of the American occupation, as it continues to exploit the chaotic death spiral of post-Saddam Iraq for its own long-term plan of a Sunni resurgence in Iraq. That the Sunni resistance will continue to fight an American occupation is a guarantee. That it will continue to persevere is highly probable. That the United States will be able to stop it is unlikely. And so, the reality that the only policy direction worthy of consideration here in the United States concerning Iraq is the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American forces continues to hold true. And the fact that this option is given short shrift by all capable of making or influencing such a decision guarantees that this bloody war will go on, inconclusively and incomprehensibly, for many more years. That is the one image in my crystal ball that emerges in full focus, and which will serve as the basis of defining a national nightmare for generations to come.
Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, including "Iraq Confidential" (Nation Books, 2005) , "Target Iran" (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest, "Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement" (Nation Books, April 2007).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/76318/ | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 9:16 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19421.htm
The Calm Before the Conflagration
By Chris Hedges
25/02/08 "Truthdig" -- - The United States is funding and in many cases arming the three ethnic factions in Iraq-the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunni Arabs. These factions rule over partitioned patches of Iraqi territory and brutally purge rival ethnic groups from their midst. Iraq no longer exists as a unified state. It is a series of heavily armed fiefdoms run by thugs, gangs, militias, radical Islamists and warlords who are often paid wages of $300 a month by the U.S. military. Iraq is Yugoslavia before the storm. It is a caldron of weapons, lawlessness, hate and criminality that is destined to implode. And the current U.S. policy, born of desperation and defeat, means that when Iraq goes up, the U.S. military will have to scurry like rats for cover.
The supporters of the war, from the Bush White House to Sen. John McCain, tout the surge as the magic solution. But the surge, which primarily deployed 30,000 troops in and around Baghdad, did little to thwart the sectarian violence. The decline in attacks began only when we bought off the Sunni Arabs. U.S. commanders in the bleak fall of 2006 had little choice. It was that or defeat. The steady rise in U.S. casualties, the massive car bombs that tore apart city squares in Baghdad and left hundreds dead, the brutal ethnic cleansing that was creating independent ethnic enclaves beyond our control throughout Iraq, the death squads that carried out mass executions and a central government that was as corrupt as it was impotent signaled catastrophic failure.
The United States cut a deal with its Sunni Arab enemies. It would pay the former insurgents. It would allow them to arm and form military units and give them control of their ethnic enclaves. The Sunni Arabs, in exchange, would halt attacks on U.S. troops. The Sunnis Arabs agreed.
The U.S. is currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pay the monthly salaries of some 600,000 armed fighters in the three rival ethnic camps in Iraq. These fighters-Shiite, Kurd and Sunni Arab-are not only antagonistic but deeply unreliable allies. The Sunni Arab militias have replaced central government officials, including police, and taken over local administration and security in the pockets of Iraq under their control. They have no loyalty outside of their own ethnic community. Once the money runs out, or once they feel strong enough to make a thrust for power, the civil war in Iraq will accelerate with deadly speed. The tactic of money-for-peace failed in Afghanistan. The U.S. doled out funds and weapons to tribal groups in Afghanistan to buy their loyalty, but when the payments and weapons shipments ceased, the tribal groups headed back into the embrace of the Taliban.
The Sunni Arab militias are known by a variety of names: the Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias call themselves “sahwas” (”sahwa” being the Arabic word for awakening). There are now 80,000 militia fighters, nearly all Sunni Arabs, paid by the United States to control their squalid patches of Iraq. They are expected to reach 100,000. The Sunni Arab militias have more fighters under arms than the Shiite Mahdi Army and are about half the size of the feeble Iraqi army. The Sunni Awakening groups, which fly a yellow satin flag, are forming a political party.
The Sunni Arab militias, though they have ended attacks on U.S. forces, detest the Shiite-Kurdish government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and abhor the presence of U.S. troops on Iraqi soil. They take the money and the support with clenched teeth because with it they are able to build a renegade Sunni army, a third force inside Iraq, which they believe will make it possible to overthrow the central government. The Sunni Arabs, who make up about 40 percent of Iraq’s population, held most positions of power under Saddam Hussein. They dominated Iraq’s old officer corps. They made up its elite units, including the Republic Guard divisions and the Special Forces regiments. They controlled the intelligence agencies. There are several hundred thousand well-trained Sunni Arabs who lack only an organizational structure. We have now made the formation of this structure possible. These militias are the foundation for a deadlier insurgent force, one that will dwarf anything the United States faced in the past. The U.S. is arming, funding and equipping its own assassins.
There have been isolated clashes that point to a looming conflagration. A Shiite-dominated unit of the regular army in the late summer of 2007 attacked a strong Sunni Arab force west of Baghdad. U.S. troops thrust themselves between the two factions. The enraged Shiites, thwarted in their attack, kidnapped relatives of the commander of the Sunni Arab force, and American negotiators had to plead frantically for their release. There have been scattered incidents like this one throughout Iraq.
If the U.S. begins, as promised, to withdraw troops it will be harder to keep these antagonistic factions apart. The cease-fire by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, extended a few days ago, could collapse. And if that happens a civil war, unlike anything U.S. forces have experienced in Iraq, will begin. Such a conflagration, with the potential to draw in neighboring states and lead to the dismemberment of Iraq, would be the final chapter of the worst foreign policy blunder in American history.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.“ | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 11:15 pm Post subject: |
| Iraq war (for Israel) costing US taxpayers trillions and trillions which should have been spent in the USA for Americans instead (right in accordance with Ron Paul's message as well):
Studies: Iraq costs US $12B per month
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent2 hours, 7 minutes ago
The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the "burn" rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.
Beyond 2008, working with "best-case" and "realistic-moderate" scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion — or more — by 2017.
Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.
Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted. But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say.
In a Jan. 30 report to Congress, the GAO observed that the U.S. will be committing "significant" future resources to the wars, "requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge."
These numbers don't include the war's cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion — with its devastating air bombardments — and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.
No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.
In their book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War," Stiglitz, of Columbia University, and Bilmes, of Harvard, report the two wars will have cost the U.S. budget $845 billion in 2007 dollars by next Sept. 30, end of fiscal year 2008, assuming Congress fully funds Bush administration requests. That counts not just military operations, but embassy costs, reconstruction and other war-related expenses.
That total far surpasses the $670 billion in 2007 dollars the Congressional Research Service says was the U.S. price tag for the 12-year Vietnam War.
Although American military and Iraqi civilian casualties have declined in recent months, the rate of spending has shot up. A fully funded 2008 war budget will be 155 percent higher than 2004's, the CBO reports.
The reasons are numerous: the "surge" of additional U.S. units into Iraq; rising fuel costs; fattened bonuses to attract re-enlistments; and particularly the need to "reset," that is, repair or replace worn-out, destroyed or damaged military equipment. Almost $17 billion is appropriated this year for advanced armored vehicles to protect troops against roadside bombs.
Looking ahead, both the CBO and Stiglitz-Bilmes construct two scenarios, one in which U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan drop sharply and early — to 30,000 by late 2009 for the CBO, and to 55,000 by 2012 for Stiglitz-Bilmes — and a second in which the drawdown is more gradual.
Significantly, the two studies view different time frames, the CBO calculating possible costs met in the next 10 years, while Stiglitz and Bilmes also include costs incurred during that period but paid for later, such as equipment replaced in post-2017 budgets.
This factor figures most in the category of veterans' medical care and disability payments, where the CBO foresees $9 billion to $13 billion in costs by 2017. Stiglitz and Bilmes, meanwhile, project $422 billion to $717 billion in costs over the lifetime of soldiers who by 2017 are wounded or otherwise mentally or physically disabled by the wars.
"The CBO is only looking 10 years out on everything," Bilmes noted in an interview.
For its part, a CBO critique suggested that Bilmes and Stiglitz might be overstating the expense of treating veterans' brain injuries, a costly category.
The two economists say their calculations are conservative, because they don't encompass many "hidden" items in the U.S. budget. Their basic projections also exclude the potentially huge debt-service cost — on which CBO approximately agrees — and the cost to the U.S. economy of global oil prices that have quadrupled since 2003, an increase analysts blame partly on the Iraq upheaval.
Estimating all economic and social costs might push the U.S. war bill up toward $5 trillion by 2017, they say.
Their book already figures in the stay-or-leave debate over Iraq.
When Stiglitz testified on Feb. 28 before the congressional Joint Economic Committee, the ranking Republican, New Jersey's Rep. Jim Saxton, complained that such projections are too imprecise to help determine relative costs and benefits of the Iraq war.
Saxton said a rapid U.S. pullout could lead to full-scale civil war and Iranian domination of Iraq, "enormous costs" that he said should be weighed in any calculation. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:21 am Post subject: |
| Ron Paul's message of liberty is so important to American freedom at this time:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.politics.republicans/browse_thread/thread/453becfb55104966/5665347d8d595e9b#5665347d8d595e9b
CONSTITUTIONAL FREEDOMS - OUR LINE IN THE SAND
By Tal Brooke
The national landscape has been changing in alarming ways since 9/11.
A once robust nation, a considerably diminished America has embarked
on a perilous course - militarily, politically and financially while
abrogating critical freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, the
nation's founding mandate. A growing number of legal voices believe
that, in usurping these freedoms, the government has forfeited its own
legal authority by doing the very things that the Constitution, the
highest law of the land, forbids.
The government must obey the law. Do you obey a government that has
broken its highest law?
The citizens, meanwhile, lack the power to challenge the growing
Leviathan of State, able to strip away any privacy and enforce any law
with near omnipotent technology. More daunting, the State has used
various "crises" to get around posse comitatus in order use the
military within "the homeland." It can now turn the military on its
own citizens, whose lives could soon resemble the old proletariat
under Soviet rule, a situation once unthinkable.
As most 5th-graders should know the Constitutional limitations on
governmental power, by implication, are a warning against the
rapacious state becoming a tyranny. These limitations also anticipate
the erosion of freedoms and liberties through clever arguments and
sudden crises used by the State to weaken the resistance of the
people. Constitutional limitations were created so that the government
would remain the servant of the people, and prevent the people from
ever becoming servants of the State.
Citizens are to be vigilant against surrendering their freedoms in
exchange for government offers of protection, welfare or any other
so-called benefit. Benjamin Franklin warned that if they did, they'd
be worthy of neither.
SCP's burden is that we, and organizations like us, must have the
freedom to write as we see things, a freedom Americans have taken for
granted for two hundred years. When SCP is no longer able to write
freely - but is required to dance around ever narrowing guidelines
enforced by the State - we will be effectually shut down. This is a
key reason we are concerned about the issue of free speech and related
freedoms, such as individual right to privacy in light of state
surveillance. Anti-hate laws present a terrible trap. Seeming to be
high minded and benign, they will shut the door for any views at odds
with the State. This is a terrible threat.
If today's lawmakers, compromised, corrupted or indifferent to
Constitutional protections, pass draconian anti-hate laws, SCP would
be unable to make any meaningful moral judgments or critique new
religions, Neopaganism, Eastern thought, channeling, Spiritualism,
human potential, emerging cults or their various founders, leaders and
gurus.
At issue is public distrust of the deceit, corruption and blundering
of the government into preemptive wars and mounting debt.
America needs a noble statesman of deep and genuine (not pretended)
Christian conviction, broad vision, intelligence, integrity and
uncompromising character, who would champion the nation's historic
faith, its liberties and freedoms, indeed, its people - an individual
free of the influences of tainted advisors with secret agendas,
special interest groups and powerful political lobbies. A man who is
not a slick, charismatic orator but someone plain spoken and honest, a
champion of the people. [such as Ron Paul-R - ed] Such a one may be
our window of hope. But if our government is again ruled by another
whose ultimate loyalty is to a foreign power or shrouded special
interests, America may never recover. Some fear this might be our last
election.
America is in trouble with mounting debt, over thirty million illegal
aliens who have flooded across open borders (as the government
subjects American citizens to humiliating searches), the dollar in
free-fall, growing international contempt for America's hubris and
preemptive wars, the sub-prime lending crisis, banks and mortgage
firms being bailed out as homes are foreclosed, the trillion dollar
cost of invading Iraq, and now a "no fly list" in which the government
can dictate to citizens whether or not they are permitted to fly.
Perhaps most discouraging is the utter indifference of a public
distracted by "bread and circuses," a far cry from those early
patriots who fought for our freedoms.
One of America's premier writers of a century back predicted:
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and
carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
This is exactly what comes to mind when you recall American flags and
calls to patriotism being invoked to justify meek public trust of our
preemptive wars in the Middle East, the Patriot Act and emergency
legislation creating an imperial presidency that is above the law -
all of it managed like a Hollywood extravaganza as the people stare on
numbly, barely comprehending what is going on.
In this vein, Judge Napolitano writes in his latest hook, A Nation of
Sheep (p. xi), that after 9/11 "the neocons who dominate the
Republican Party" commenced three separate wars: one in Afghanistan,
another in Iraq, and "the third against the civil liberties of the
American people." He states:
[T]he [present Administration] has systematically attacked and
diminished virtually every freedom and right guaranteed by the
Constitution: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of
religion, freedom of association, the right to privacy, the right not
to self incriminate, the right to counsel, the right to speedy trials,
the right to fair trials, the right to avoid cruel and unusual
punishment, even the right to be set free after acquittal!.... the
President has broken laws he swore to uphold, and declined to enforce
laws that he has himself signed into existence.
We may well face the very nightmare that the founders of this Republic
tried to prevent from happening - a tyranny worse than anything they
had seen under King George III. Because, unlike then, the technology
of today can bring virtually any individual to his knees: from
implantable GPS monitoring chips, ID cards, cameras and tracking
devices on every street corner, iris scans, the power of Government to
perform unlimited wire taps and email espionage on its citizens, to
the present day reality of super-computers with vast databases of
information about each and every one of us.
If we "win" the "War on Terror," yet lose our freedoms, we will have
lost everything.
Borrowed from SCP (Spiritual Counterfeits Project) Newsletter.
Tal Brooke, Editor and President
www.SCP-Inc.org | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:42 am Post subject: |
| And here is a Jewish neocon in Cheney's office who has nothing but contempt for the Constitution (to include the Bill of Rights):
“Cheney’s Cheney”: David Addington—the Administration’s Hard-Line Invisible Man
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/Sept_Oct_2006/0609038.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:45 am Post subject: |
| Here is JINSA Zionist Jew Michael Ledeen who is an admirer of the Italian fascists and didn't think Mussolini went far enough (he is an advisor to JINSA/PNAC/AEI associated Dick Cheney and is based at AEI along with fellow JINSA/PNAC Jewish Neocon Richard Perle as Cheney's wife is a fellow at AEI ax well):
Flirting with Fascism:
http://www.amconmag.com/06_30_03/feature.html | | | | Alpha | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
