Tag: War
What’s more interesting? War or Peace?
What’s more interesting? War or Peace?
I ran a query on Google Trends, and you could probably have predicted that war is far more interesting than peace. Here’s the graph that resulted:
War is always more interesting that peace. That’s how we are wired. We find conflict so interesting that the news media creates conflict when there isn’t any naturally occurring. We are have thus become a society addicted to conflict, the more the better, it seems. Thus, with media reinforcing our dark urges to be entertained by violence, we have become a war-mongering society. In this post, I called our addiction “Conflict Pornography.”
Sting: The war on drugs is a failure
Sting has written a Huffpo article declaring the “war on drugs” to be a failure:
Everyone knows the War on Drugs has failed. It’s time to step out of our comfort zones, acknowledge the truth — and challenge our leaders … and ourselves … to change.
How is this “war” a failure? Sting refers to an opinion piece by the Drug Policy Alliance that sets forth the following facts:
Consider the consequences of drug prohibition today: 500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations; 1.8 million drug arrests last year; tens of billions of taxpayer dollars expended annually to fund a drug war that 76% of Americans say has failed; millions now marked for life as former drug felons; many thousands dying each year from drug overdoses that have more to do with prohibitionist policies than the drugs themselves, and tens of thousands more needlessly infected with AIDS and Hepatitis C because those same policies undermine and block responsible public-health policies.
Seventh anniversary of the Iraq invasion
Truthout has published a recap of what the invasion of Iraq has brought to the United States:
We are still shocked. We were never awed. We have not adjusted. The senseless waste of our blood and treasure, our honor and our reputation continue. Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom – the latter unleashed seven years ago today – have morphed into a single Operation Enduring Occupation, set to bankrupt this country financially as well as morally, to destroy our own security as it has that of the over 31 million people who populate Iraq and 32 million people of Afghanistan. . . . Of course, the loss of our troops (over 4,200 dead and 30,000 wounded) and treasure (three trillion dollars according to economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz), the perversion of our language, the mangling of our laws, the broken bodies and tortured brains of our veterans really bear no comparison with the suffering we have inflicted on the citizens of Iraq.
Cost of our new high-speed trains is dwarfed by the tax dollars we waste in our Afghanistan and Iraq “wars.”
President Obama has recently announced that he will allocate $8 billion ($4 billion each year, over two years) to develop a new system of high-speed passenger rail service. This is an excellent idea. The new rail lines will be created within 10 geographical corridors ranging from 100 to 600 miles long.
Note, however, that the high-speed rail line system will be an extremely expensive project, and that the $8 billion bill will need to be paid by 138 million tax-paying Americans. Dividing the $8 billion cost by the number of taxpayers, we can see that, on average, each taxpayer will pay almost $60 ($30 per year, for two years) to support this massive new high-speed rail service.
Again, this high-speed rail project will cost an immense amount of money. Consider, though, how small this pile of rail money looks when compared to the amount of money we are wasting in the “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. For 2009, the United States spent approximately $87 billion for Iraq and $47 billion for Afghanistan. The fiscal 2010 budget requests $65 billion for Afghanistan operations and $61 billion for Iraq. the cost of these two “wars” together is $126 billion for 2010.
Compare these expenditures on a bar chart:
Police chiefs, judges and prosecutors explain why the “war on drugs” is immoral
This video by LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) is well worth watching, especially by those who claim to support the “War on Drugs.” The many hundreds of law enforcement officials who belong to LEAP agree that what we have is not a “War on Drugs,” but prohibition, rampant social destruction and corruption.
But won’t people start using a lot more drugs if they are legalized? Not likely, based on the “Holland effect”: Legalizing marijuana in The Netherlands has lessened its appeal: Per-capita consumption is only half what it is in the United States. “They have succeeded in making marijuana boring,” according to James Gray, an Orange County Superior Court judge for 20 years.
Check out the 12-minute mark of the above video for shocking statistics on institutionalized racism.
As one of the police officers states, legalization is not about promoting drugs. It’s about stopping the violence. Once we legalize, then we can go about our work to discourage the destructive use of drugs, just like we did with cigarettes. 50% percent of adult smokers have given up that habit in the past ten years thanks to education. We cut the use of nicotine in half without telling our police to kick down doors and slap handcuffs onto smokers.
Judge Gray indicates that ending the “war on drugs” is the “single most important thing we could do” to improve our urban neighborhoods.
What is the war on drugs? According to one of the speakers in the above video, it’s “sixty nine billion dollars per year down the rat hole.” I agree. The “War on Drugs” should be renamed the “Inject Violence Into Neighborhoods Project.” It is immoral and senseless. And finally, there is good reason to believe that the momentum has changed (based on many things, including Denver’s legalization of marijuana). Large numbers of Americans are starting to question this insane “War.”
Judge Gray makes the point that legalizing marijuana is NOT condoning it. In the following talk (Oct 28, 2009), he gives a long litany of additional reasons for regulating and controlling marijuana. The biggest reason for legalizing is the the present system endangers children:
For much more important information, see the home page of LEAP.
Afghanistan jackpot
I’ve often written about my frustration with the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan. I don’t see any real progress. What business would be willing to keep spending huge amounts of money without seeing any progress? Yet our government continues to do this. And I have yet to see any meaningful government benchmarks regarding Afghanistan, probably because there aren’t actually any benchmarks. We have also kept our troops in Afghanistan because of the sunk costs fallacy; we are there shedding blood and inconceivable numbers of tax dollars because we’ve been there. It is circular and insane.
I can think of yet another reason that we are still there. All you need to do is follow the money. An acquaintance of mine recently informed me that a close relative of hers, formerly a career military man, quit the military but stayed in Afghanistan. For the past few years he’s been making $250,000 per year in Afghanistan doing essentially the same job that he had been doing with the military. She told me that there are large numbers of these private soldiers in Afghanistan making similar obscene amounts of money. If our mission in Afghanistan were really vital to national security, then we should be allowing our government military handle the situation. You know, the same guys who prevailed in Iwo Jima.
But no. The private contractors are swarming all over Afghanistan:
According to a report last week from the Congressional Research Service, there were about 64,000 uniformed U.S. troops in Afghanistan in September and 104,101 military contractors . . . The Obama administration’s planned deployment of 30,000 more troops in the coming months could require as many as 56,000 more contractors, the report estimated. Xe, the Moyock, N.C.-based private military company, is already on the ground in Afghanistan despite its controversial history in Iraq, and is in the running for additional contracts.
It’s also becoming clear that economically powerful companies are convincing our politicians that we need to be there, whether or not there is actually a well-defined mission. Even Blackwater (now renamed “Xe”) is in the thick of it. Charles Lewis reports:
Fascinated and alarmed by the Tammany Hall feeling of political favoritism or cronyism I was getting, we launched into another epic investigation and published “Outsourcing the Pentagon: Who’s Winning the Big Contracts” in the fall of 2004. We examined 2.2 million contract actions over six fiscal years, totaling $900 billion in authorized expenditures, and discovered that no-bid contracts had accounted for more than 40 percent of Pentagon contracting, $362 billion in taxpayer money to companies without competitive bidding. In other words, the multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts Halliburton had received actually weren’t such an aberration, unfortunately. Indeed, we found contractors had written the Department of Defense budget, were guarding our soldiers in the Green Zone in Iraq, had participated in the Abu Ghraib interrogations and when the Secretary of Army wanted to find out just how many contractors were being employed, he naturally hired a company to find it out.
That was back in 2004. It’s much worse now, which you can see by examining these links at Citizens for Legitimate Government. Check out this chart demonstrating that the high-priced private contractors far outnumber U.S. soldiers. Oh, and read the advertisements to see what kind of people are signing up to “fighting for our freedom” overseas:
Thousands of men and women have said goodbye to the 9-5 dead-end hometown job lock-down and are happily hopping from one country to the next. With nothing to worry about but where to spend their 3 months vacation or what to do with all the money they have made 99.9% of the population doesn’t have this luxury – because they don’t know about it. They have never even heard of High Paying International Civilian Contractor Jobs. Your career doesn’t have to be connected to just one country; you can work wherever you want! If it’s the Big Bucks that you’re looking for, then places like Iraq and Afghanistan are paying 6 figs.
What is the historical context of the ratio of contractors to soldiers?
According to a Congressional Research Service report obtained by the Federation of American Scientists blog Secrecy News, the ratio of contractors to troops is higher “than in any conflict in the history of the United States.”
The phenomenon Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex is alive and well. There are so very many better ways to spend these tax dollars. Actually, we are spending tax dollars that we don’t actually have in Afghanistan. And we’re spending and fighting regarding “terrorists” who are almost non-existent in Afghanistan.
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.
With 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at an estimated yearly cost of $30 billion, it means that for every one al Qaeda fighter, the U.S. will commit 1,000 troops and $300 million a year.
It’s time to pull the plug on this “war,” in which our main accomplishment seems to be protecting the opium trade.
Drones, dollars, and the open-source insurgency
Yesterday, I wrote on the massive new $636 billion “defense” spending bill passed by the House of Representatives. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal should make us further question the efficacy of this type of high-technology spending.
A MQ-1 Predator drone costs some $4.5 million dollars each. They have a wingspan of approximately 48 feet, weigh 2,250 lbs. when loaded, have a range of over 2,000 miles, and have a ceiling altitude of 25,000 ft. They can be loaded with two hellfire missiles, making them available for a combination of reconnaissance, combat or support roles. The MQ-9 Reaper drone, the larger and more-heavily armored cousin of the Predator, cost about $10.5 million each.
The Air Force maintains a fleet of 195 Predators (total cost ~$877.5 million) and 28 Reapers (total cost ~ $294 million). The New York Times reported earlier this year that they are flying 34 daily surveillance patrols in Afghanistan and Iraq, up from 12 in 2006. They transmit some 16,000 hours of video each month.
Insurgents can spend $25.95 to purchase Skygrabber, a program available on the internet which allows them to intercept the video transmitted by these drones.
Obama, Afghanistan, and deja vu all over again
First, some background:
- May 1, 2003 President George W. Bush, while standing in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, declares “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
- October 27, 2007 Presidential candidate Barack H. Obama, speaking on the Iraq War, declares “I will promise you this: that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home, we will bring an end to this war, you can take that to the bank.”
- November 4, 2008 Candidate Obama is elected to the presidency.
- January 20, 2009 Obama’s inauguration.
- January 21, 2009 First full-day of Obama’s presidency passes with no sign that he intends to bring the troops home.
- February 18, 2009 President Obama orders 17,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan.
- February 27, 2009 President Obama declares “Let me say this as plainly as I can: By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” Ok, so it’s not the “first thing he will do”, but he will definitely do it. Someday. For sure, all the troops from Iraq will be out by 2011. It’s hard to tell though, the 2012 elections will be right around the corner by that point…
New realistic war video game
Two new videos from Onion Network News:
Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks
And now a video about Ford’s new concept car:
Ford Unveils New Car For Cash-Strapped Buyers: The 1993 Taurus
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