THE ABSURD TIMES
THE ABSURD TIMES
Illustration: Bill Clinton before his defense of his wife, Hillary. Bill said, about Hillary, "After all, it was after 11:00, she was exhausted, and she's over 60" (Bill like blondes, Hillary used to have dark hair.) Another reason for the ilustration is just that I've liked Sheryl Crow since she was banned in Wal-Mart.
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Let's just review a few things that have happened in the last few days.
The Clinton headquarters in Indiana burned down and Bill said "We will rise from the ashes," an apparent reference to the Phoenix. I hope so. The Phoenix does that every 500 years according to the myth, so we will be safe for awhile.
George Bush said we will know when our job in Iraq is finished when it [Iraq] is able to help us fight our enemies! Guam? No, he probably means Iran.
Bowling seems to be an important factor in this election. Neither Hillary nor Obama were able to knock down more than one or two pins at a time. However, I remember George Sr. once demonstrating his style, which was ok, except he forgot to let the ball go and its momentum carried him forward and onto his face on the bowling lane.
A recent Poll indicated that a McCain/Rice combination would defeat an Obama/Clinton one. Why on earth would anyone take such a poll? It ain't gonna happen nohow noway anywhere not never. [Just practicing syntax in case I want to run for political office. Local Libertarians have talked about my running for Sheriff as I've told them I'd never show up at my office unless they let me smoke there.]
I've noticed that there is a lot of protest over the Olympic torch going around the world. The Dali Lama is against the protests. I don't follow - it would seem that American politicians, who are so fond of quoting Hitler, would like to keep this grand tradition he started alive. Munich. Jessie Owens. You know.
A bill has been introduced into the Senate to make John McCain a "natural born citizen." See, he was born in Panama, both parents citizens, so the citizen part is no problem. It's the word "Natural" that some people are worried about. It's absurd, of course, but that does not exclude it as important news.
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Here are a couple articles about the cost of the occupation of Iraq. They seem appropriate as this is the bloodiest week of the year for American Soldiers in Iraq:
Three Trillion Dollar War Review
April 09, 2008 By *Girish Mishra*
Girish Mishra's ZSpace Page </zspace/girishmishra>
Karl Marx once remarked: "War in direct economic terms is just the same
as if a nation cast part of its capital into water." After many decades,
once again, the validity of this statement has been underlined by the
invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US-led coalition. A period of
more than five years has elapsed, yet there is no sign of freedom,
democracy and prosperity as promised to the Iraqi people. In fact, the
invasion and continued occupation has brought enormous devastation of
this ancient country, nor has it done any good even to the people of
America and its coalition partners. This has been analyzed at length in
a recently published book, /The Three Trillion Dollar War,/ by Joseph
Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.
No way, this book can be ignored by terming it as mere propaganda. Among
its authors is Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, who once
headed the team of economic advisers to President Clinton and then
became chief economist at the World Bank. His books have been widely
read and discussed all over the world. Linda Bilmes teaches at the
Harvard University and was once a high ranking official in the Clinton
administration looking after financial and commercial affairs.
At the time of American invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration gave
out that its aim was to liberate the Iraqi people from the clutches of
Saddam Hussein, giving them freedom and democracy and putting them onto
the path of happiness and prosperity and, this mission would cost just
$50-$60 billion. Lawrence B. Lindsey, then economic adviser to Bush,
dared challenge this figure as an underestimation and he was thrown out
of his job. He had predicted that the cost might be somewhere from $100
to $200 billion. To quote Lindsey, "My hypothetical estimate got the
annual cost about right. But I misjudged an important factor: how long
we would be involved." Five years after his ouster, he believes that
"one of the reasons the administration's efforts are so unpopular that
they chose not to engage in an open public discussion of what the
consequences might be, including the economic cost."
Just three months after the invasion, The Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace came out with its Policy Brief (no.24, May 2003),
"Lessons from the Past: The American Record on Nation Building." The
very opening paragraph said: "The real test for the success of the U.S.
preemptive war against the regime of Saddam Hussein is whether or not
Iraq can now be rebuilt after the war. Few national undertakings are as
complex, costly, and time consuming as reconstructing the governing
institutions of foreign societies. Even a combination of unsurpassed
military power and abundant wealth does not guarantee success, let alone
quick results. Historically, nation-building attempts by outside powers
are notably mainly for their bitter disappointments, not their triumphs."
The authors of the Policy Brief—Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper—pointed out
that the United States, till then, had used its armed forces in foreign
lands on more than 200 occasions and its nation-building record had been
utterly dismal. What they said has proved to be prophetic: "The internal
characteristics of Iraqi society will severely test Washington's
resolve, skill, and patience in pursuing its declared goal of political
transformation. With a population of 24 million, Iraq is larger than any
of the Latin American countries where the United States has attempted
nation building." With its deep ethnic divisions, the internal situation
would be too complicated for the Americans to deal with. "Outside
efforts to bridge such ethnic and religious divisions through
reconciliation have a poor track record—as has been demonstrated in the
former Yugoslavia." It would be extremely difficult "to align U.S.
strategic interests with those of the Iraqi elite and public."
Warning the hawks in the Bush administration, the authors said, "they
should reconsider their position in light of the sobering lessons from
American nation building during the past century. Aside from an overall
low rate of success, such unilateral undertakings have led to the
creation and maintenance surrogate regimes that have eventually mutated
into military dictatorships and corrupt autocracies. Repeating these
mistakes in Iraq, especially after President Bush's declaration of
American resolve to build democracy there, would be a tragedy for the
Iraqi people and a travesty of American democratic ideals."
Stiglitz and Bilmes have come out with a mass of data in their three
hundred and odd page book, underlining that Pei and Kasper were
perfectly right and Bush and his team completely wrong in going ahead
with their criminal act of invading and devastating Iraq. In the
process, they have harmed the very American people that entrusted them
with the reins of the state. Stiglitz and Bilmes correctly assert: "By
now it is clear that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake.
Nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have been killed, and more than 58,000 have
been wounded, injured, or fallen seriously ill... One hundred thousand
U.S. soldiers have returned from the war suffering from mental health
disorders, a significant fraction of which will be chronic afflictions.
Miserable though Saddam Hussein's regime was, life is actually worse for
the Iraqi people now. The country's roads, schools, hospitals, homes,
and museums have been destroyed and its citizens have less access to
electricity and water than before the war. Sectarian violence is rife.
Iraq's chaos has made the country a magnet for terrorists of all
stripes. The notion that invading Iraq would bring democracy and
catalyze change in the Middle East now seems like a fantasy. When the
full price of the war has been paid, trillions of dollars will have been
added to our national debt. Invading Iraq has also driven up oil prices.
In these and other ways, the war has weakened our economy."
Till now, America has spent $600 billion on Iraq war. Stiglitz and
Bilmes have calculated, after taking into account both direct and
indirect, open and hidden, expenses and assuming that the war is going
to last a bit longer, that it will cost $3 trillion or, maybe, $4
trillion. Countering the argument that this is a very small sum for the
largest economy in the world, they say, "The issue is not whether
America can afford three trillion dollars. With a typical American
household income in 2006 just short of $70,000, we have far more than we
need to get by. Even if we threw 10 percent of that away, we would still
be no worse off than we were in 1995—when we were a prosperous and
well-off country. There is no risk that a trillion dollars or two or
three will bankrupt the country. The relevant question is a rather
different one: What could we have done with a trillion dollars or two or
three? What have we had to sacrifice? What is, to use the economists'
jargon, the opportunity cost?"
The opportunity cost of the Iraq war has been enormous. With the money
being spent on Iraq war, America could have easily solved its social
security problem at least for the next half a century. With one trillion
dollars, it could have constructed as many as 8 million new dwelling
units, employed 13 million more school teachers, provided elementary
education to 120 million kids or health insurance to 530 million
children for one year or granted scholarships to 43 million students for
four years. Multiply these figures by 3 and you get the opportunity cost
of $3 trillion to be gobbled up by the Iraq war. In a recent article in
/The Guardian/ (April 6), Stiglitz and Bilmes, while refuting Bush's
claim that the $3 trillion dollar estimate of the total cost may be
exaggerated, assert that it is "in fact, conservative. Even the
president would have to admit that the $50 to $60 billion estimate given
by the administration before the war was wildly off the mark; there is
little reason to have confidence in their arithmetic. They admit to a
cost so far of $600 billion."
Explaining why their estimates are different, they state: "Our numbers
differ from theirs for three reasons: first, we are estimating the total
cost of the war, under alternative conservative scenarios, derived from
the defence department and congressional budget office. We are not
looking at McCain's 100-year scenario- we assume that we are there, in
the diminished strength, only through to 2017. But neither are we
looking at a scenario that sees our troops pulled out within six months.
With operational spending going on at $12 billion a month, and with
every year costing more than the last, it is easy to come to a total
operational cost that is double the $600 billion already spent.
"Second, we include war expenditures hidden elsewhere in the budget, and
budgetary expenditures that we would have to incur in the future even if
we left tomorrow. Most important of these are future costs of caring for
the 40%of returning veterans that are likely to suffer from disabilities
(in excess of $600 billion; second world war veterans' costs didn't peak
until 1993), and restoring the military to its prewar strength. If you
include interest, and interest on the interest - with all of the war
debt financed - the budgetary costs quickly mount.
"Finally, our $3 trillion dollars estimate also includes costs to the
economy that go beyond the budget, for instance, the cost of caring for
the huge number of returning disabled veterans that go beyond the costs
borne by the federal government - in one out of five families with a
serious disability, someone has to give up a job. The macro-economic
costs are even larger. Almost every expert we have talked to agrees that
the war has had something to do with the rise in the price of oil; it
was not just an accident that oil prices began to soar at the same time
as the war began."
The Iraq war has adversely impacted not only the two sides involved in
it but also the world at large, especially the developing nations. As a
result of the war, while the demand for oil has increased, its supply
has declined as the production in Iraq has declined. At the time of the
invasion of Iraq, oil was selling $25 a barrel but now it can be had for
around$100 a barrel. In the years to come, it may go up to $125 a
barrel. The increasing price of oil has strengthened inflationary
pressures around the world. Besides, the production of ethanol and other
bio-fuels is being undertaken by diverting corn, sugarcane, soybeans and
other crops to it. This, in turn, contributes to the worldwide growing
shortage of food grains and pushes up the prices. The higher oil prices
have inflicted a direct cost to the world economy to the tune of roughly
$1.1 trillion.
Since the beginning of the Iraq war, America's national debt has gone up
by $2.5 trillion, out of which $1 trillion has been due to the Iraq war.
Bush, after coming to power, reduced the tax liabilities of the upper
income group people. It means the burden of meeting the war expenditures
has fallen more on the people at large. By 2017, it is estimated that
the national debt will increase by $2 trillion.
There are other adverse consequences that defy quantification. For
example, the morale of the troops is very low, there is a shortage of
wherewithal and there is a nationwide discontent because of insufficient
attention to the wounded soldiers. So far as the Iraqis are concerned,
more than a million people have perished. There is no law and order
worth the name. Anarchy reins supreme. As many as 45 per cent of the
families in Baghdad have lost their one or more members. There is a
large-scale displacement of the population. To quote Stiglitz and
Bilmes, "In human terms, it is the loss of life and the destruction of
Iraqi society that is the most egregious...
"For most Iraqis, daily life has become unbearable—to the point that
those who can afford to leave their country have done so. By September
2007, a stunning 4.6 million people—one of every seven Iraqis—had been
uprooted from their homes. This is the largest migration of people in
the Middle East since the creation of Israel in 1948."
As many as 2.4 million Iraqis have migrated to foreign lands, especially
Syria and Jordan, who are also feeling the strain. In all 20 per cent of
the pre-war population is displaced. Those who are left behind have
neither drinking water nor electricity. Schools and colleges do not
function because most of the teachers have either fled or been killed.
Hospitals suffer from lack of beds, doctors, nursing staff and medicines.
Iraq's museums have been looted and historical treasures have been taken
away. Valuable manuscripts have been lost, stolen or destroyed.
Christopher Hitchens says of Baghdad: "This is one of the greatest
centres of learning and culture in history. It was here that some of the
lost works of Aristotle and other Greeks... were preserved,
retranslated, and transmitted via Andalusia back to the the ignorant
"Christian" West." Naomi Klein, in her "The Shock Doctrine," has given
the details of the plunder and has also narrated how Iraqi economy has
been destroyed to make it pasture for the MNCs.
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Iraq War Costs Skyrocketing, But Congress Unable to Scrutinize Spending
April 11, 2008 By *Jason Leopold*
Jason Leopold's ZSpace Page </zspace/jasonleopold1>
Nearly all of the $516 billion allocated by Congress to fund the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq has come in the form of emergency spending
requests, a method the White House has abused, depriving Congress the
ability to scrutinize how the Pentagon spends money in the so-called
global war on terror. The use of emergency supplemental bills to fund
the wars has likely resulted in the waste of billions of taxpayer
dollars, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability
Office.
Dozens of emergency funding requests that Congress has approved since
2001 is unprecedented compared with past military conflicts when war
funding went through the normal appropriations process. As of March, the
GAO said average monthly costs to fund military operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan has reached roughly $12.3 billion, $10 billion for Iraq
alone, more than double what it cost to fund the war in 2004.
"Over 90% of [the Department of Defense] funds were provided as
emergency funds in supplemental or additional appropriations; the
remainder were provided in regular defense bills or in transfers from
regular appropriations," the report said. "Emergency funding is exempt
from ceilings applying to discretionary spending in Congress's annual
budget resolutions. Some Members have argued that continuing to fund
ongoing operations in supplementals reduces congressional oversight."
Vernonique de Rugy, a senior research fellow and budget scholar at the
Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said funding the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars through emergency legislation is troubling because the
money "doesn't get counted in deficit projections, making it hard to
track the real cost of the war and effectively removing any upper limits
on spending for the war."
"Even seven years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, and five
years after the start of the war in Iraq, Congress and the president are
still using "emergency" funding bills to cover costs, rather than going
through the regular appropriations process," said de Rugy, who just
published an article on the issue, "The Trillion-Dollar War," in the May
issue of Reason magazine. "While other wars have initially been funded
using emergency supplementals, they have quickly been incorporated into
the regular budget. Never before has emergency supplemental spending
been used to fund an entire war and over the course of so many years."
Most troubling about this trend, the GAO said in a report issued in
February, is that while the Pentagon's budget requests has steadily
increased annually the reasons the Defense Department has cited to
explain its skyrocketing costs "do not appear to be enough to explain
the size of and continuation of increases."
"Although some of the factors behind the rapid increase in DOD funding
are known — the growing intensity of operations, additional force
protection gear and equipment, substantial upgrades of equipment,
converting units to modular configurations, and new funding to train and
equip Iraqi security forces — these elements" fail to justify the
increase, the GAO report stated, adding that "little of the $93 billion
DOD increase between [fiscal year] 2004 and [fiscal year] 2007 appears
to reflect changes in the number of deployed personnel."
Furthermore, a $70 billion "placeholder" request included in the fiscal
year 2009 budget that the Pentagon says will be used to finance
operations in Iraq does not include any details on how the money will be
spent "making it impossible to estimate its allocation," according to
the report.
The GAO added the Pentagon has used emergency supplemental requests to
get Congress to fund equipment and vehicle upgrades that would otherwise
come out of the Pentagon's annual budget. The Pentagon has succeeded
largely due to a new way it now defines the war on terror.
"Although some of this increase may reflect additional force protection
and replacement of "stressed" equipment, much may be in response to
[Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon] England's new guidance to fund
requirements for the "longer war" rather than DOD's traditional
definition of war costs as strictly related to immediate war needs," the
GAO report says, adding that Congress must immediately begin to demand a
more transparent accounting of Pentagon emergency spending in order to
put an end to the agency's accounting chicanery.
"For example, the Navy initially requested $450 million for six EA-18G
aircraft, a new electronic warfare version of the F-18, and the Air
Force $389 million for two Joint Strike Fighters, an aircraft just
entering production; such new aircraft would not be delivered for about
three years and so could not be used meet immediate war needs," the GAO
report said.
On Wednesday, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee,
Gen. Richard Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff, said the military
will soon run out of cash if lawmakers don't act to approve a $102
billion emergency supplemental spending bill to continue funding
military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We start running out of military pay for our force in June, we start
running out of operational dollars that we can flow to the force in
early July," Cody said. "It's all about time now. Those will be the
consequences of not getting the supplemental."
The GAO generally agrees with Cody, but said the Pentagon could dip into
its budget and transfer funds to finance operations in Iraq until late
September or early October, which would give Congress more time to
scrutinize the emergency funding request.
Still, these dire warnings from Bush administration officials and
military personnel about imminent funding shortfalls have become routine
since Democrats won control of Congress in November 2006. Last year,
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates threatened to fire more than 200,000
Defense Department employees and terminate contracts with defense
contractors because Congressional Democrats did not immediately approve
a spending package to continue funding the Iraq war. The GAO and the
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) advised Congress that Gates could tap
into the Pentagon's $471 billion budget to fund the war while Congress
continued to debate the merits of giving the White House another "blank
check" for Iraq.
Government auditors have said that these predictions are untrue and have
been cited publicly by the White House to prod Congress into quickly
passing legislation to appropriate funds. Republican lawmakers and
administration officials have also said failure by Democrats to fund the
war is tantamount to not supporting the troops. But the rhetoric has
been enough to spook Democrats into passing the emergency funding
requests, often without being aware of how the money is being spent.
Other federal agencies, including the Congressional Research Service
(CRS) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), have testified to
Congress about the limited transparency in DOD's emergency budget requests.
"While DOD has provided considerably more justification material for its
war cost requests beginning with the [fiscal year] 2007 supplemental,
many questions remain difficult to answer — such as the effect of
changes in troop levels on costs — and there continue to be unexplained
discrepancies in DOD's war cost reports, the GAO report stated.
That led the GAO to draft a letter to Congress March 17, saying the $108
billion the Pentagon has recently requested is based on "unreliable"
financial data and should be considered an "approximation," which,
technically, could be interpreted to mean the Pentagon's accounting
methods underestimated the cost of the war.
"Over the years, we have conducted a series of reviews examining funding
and reported obligations for military operations in support of [the
global war on terror], the letter, addressed to Congressional
committees, says. "Our prior work has found the data in DOD's monthly
Supplemental and Cost of War Execution Report to be of questionable
reliability. Consequently, we are unable to ensure that DOD's reported
obligations for [the global war on terror] are complete, reliable, and
accurate, and they therefore should be considered approximations...GAO
has assessed the reliability of DOD's obligation data and found
significant problems, such that these data may not accurately reflect
the true dollar value of obligations [for the global war on terror.]"
A Pentagon spokesman did not return calls for comment. But a GAO
spokeswoman said the DOD has been struggling with "deficiencies in the
Pentagon's financial management system" that contributed to the
unreliable data. She would not elaborate.
Although studies have surfaced stating that the cost of the Iraq war
could soar past $2 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office said trying
to estimate future costs for the war is difficult "because DOD has
provided little detailed information on costs incurred to date."
"The Administration has not provided any long-term estimates of costs
despite a statutory reporting requirement that the President submit a
cost estimate for [fiscal year] 2006-2011 that was enacted in 2004," the
GAO said.
/ /
/Jason Leopold is the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie,"
a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com <http://www.newsjunkiebook.com/>
for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored
award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to
Halliburton's work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the
Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a
series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity.
Leopold is working on a new nonprofit online publication, expected to
launch soon./
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