There are much better ways to create jobs than handing money to the military, according to an article by Alternet: "When we spend $1 billion on the military rather than green investments, health care or education we forfeit between 5,000 and 17,000 jobs."
I didn't write anything for yesterday's commemoration. Many others, most far better suited to memorializing the day, said a great deal. My paltry mutterings would add little to what is, really, a personal day for most of us. Like all the big anniversary events, the "where were you when" aspect makes it personal and maybe that's the most important part, I don't know. Instead it occurred to me to say something about the element of the disaster that puzzles most of us, even while most of us exhibit the very trait that disturbs us deeply in this context. One of the most common questions asked at the time and still today is in the top 10 is: how could those men do that? Meaning, of course, how could they abandon what we consider personal conscience and common humanity to perpetrate horrible destruction at the cost of their own lives. The simple answer is also the most complex: they were following a leader. I'm going to string together what may seem unrelated observations now to make a larger point and I will try to corral it all together by the end to bring it to that point. Firstly, with regards to the military, there are clear-cut lines of obligation set forth, the chief one being a soldier's oath to defend the constitution. There is a code of conduct consistent with that and we have seen many instances where an officer has elected to disobey orders he or she deems illegal or immoral. There is a tradition of assuming that not only does a soldier have a right to act upon conscience, but that there is an institutional duty to back that right up. The purpose of making the oath one to the constitution (rather than to, say, the president or even to congress) first is to take the personal loyalty issue out of the equation. To underline this a bit more, a bit of history. The German army prior to WWII was similarly obligated to the state. German soldiers gave an oath to protect Germany and obey its laws. Hitler changed that, making it an oath to him, personally, the Fuhrer. (He left in place a rule explicitly obligating the German soldier to disobey illegal or immoral orders.) Unfortunately, human nature is not so geared that people find it particularly easy to dedicate themselves to an abstract without there also being a person representing it. (We see this often in small ways, especially politically, when someone who has been advocating what is on its own a good idea suddenly comes under a cloud of suspicion. Not only do people remove their support of that person but the idea is tainted as well. People have difficulty separating out the idea from the person. The reverse is less common, that a bad idea taints a popular leader.) Dedicating yourself to supporting the constitution sounds simple in a civics class, but in real life people tend to follow people. (Consider the case of Ollie North, whose dedication to Reagan trumped his legal responsibility to uphold the constitution and its legally binding requirement that he obey congress.) [More . . . ]
What are the real costs of the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? At Project Syndicate, Economist Joseph Stiglitz sizes both up the numbers and some of the intangibles:
[W]hen Linda Bilmes and I calculated America’s war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3-5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900 billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.
These are stunning numbers. By the way, I never believed the government lies about why these "wars" were necessary. No one asked my opinion as to whether we should go to war. But nonetheless, if I pay my fair share, what is my cost for my country's decade-long military adventures?Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2% of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion – $17,000 for every US household – with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50%.
I haven't take a poll, but I'd bet that virtually every taxpaying American family would rather have that $17,000 back; in fact, I'd bet almost all of them would rather, if they could, reallocate that money to any one of thousands of far worthier causes (e.g., a local school or research for a medical cure or buying books for a library), than to have that money finance Middle East military invasions. The next time a politician-hawk suggests that we ought to invade Iran, he or she should be required to go on national TV first, to present a PowerPoint presentation illustrating these massive costs set forth by Mr. Stiglitz, as well as presenting a long slide show. That show would include photos of all of the U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. 1,648 U.S. soldiers have died because of our invasion of Afghanistan and 4,4,70 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq so far. Maybe the politician wouldn't actually have time to show a slide of each dead U.S. soldier. So, perhaps, this morbid slide show, in the name of expediency, should show the faces of 25 dead U.S. soldiers per slide. Certainly, we'll want to keep each slide of 25 dead soldiers up on the screen for at least a couple minutes per slide, and there will be 244 slides. That means it will take eight hours to show the faces of all of the dead U.S. soldiers who were fighting for our "freedom." If you want to show photos of all the wounded too, you'd be in for a much longer slide show. 13,447 U.S. soldiers have been wounded in Afghanistan. More than 150,000 U.S. soldiers are receiving disability payments as a result of serving in Iraq. That slide show should also include photos of all of those American families who are missing a parent-soldier or a child-soldier. And interviews of the surviving family members of each of the soldiers who have committed suicide; there have been 1,000 of these soldier-suicides during the Iraq-Afghanistan invasions. And any worthwhile slide show should include at least a few thousand photos of the Iraqi and Afghanistan parents and children killed by any weapons, including U.S. bombs, bullets and drones in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the slide show really needs to include photos of thousands of American schools back home, all of them in desperate need of repair because the districts can't afford the repairs. the show should also include photos of millions of Americans out of work because of our reprehensible priorities under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. For the grand finale, the slide show should include photos of thousands of excellent projects that went un-built (e.g., sustainable energy projects) due to lack of funds that went, instead, to insatiable U.S. warmongering.I received this mass-email today from Alan Grayson. Within this email you will find numbers that are staggering, numbers that make a compelling argument that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East is utterly immoral:
Dear Erich: Yesterday, the Commission on Wartime Contracting released itsfinal report. The Commission reported that between $31 billion and $62 billion of the tax money spent on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan has been wasted. It also said that between $10 billion and $19 billion of what contractors billed and received was fraudulent. In fact, $360 million of our tax dollars went straight to . . . the Taliban. Wow. Who could have imagined that? Well . . . me. When I saw that the Bush Administration was doing nothing about fraud in Iraq, I revived a law going back to the Civil War that allowed whistleblowers to bring lawsuits in the name of the U.S. Government. I filed case after case, which were promptly greeted by the Bush Administration with gag orders – gag orders that they kept in place for years. They didn’t want any more bad news coming out of Iraq. So I went on CNN, spoke to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and told America whatever I could say without violating those gag orders. And when the Bush Administration finally let one case out from under those gag orders – and declined to prosecute it – I took that case to trial, and won a $14 million judgment. It was the third-largest judgment for whistleblowers in the 143-year history of that law. Those contractors built bases without hooking up the plumbing. A general testified that when he went there, he felt like throwing up. The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page article that I was “waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.” The national organization Taxpayers Against Fraud named me “Lawyer of the Year.” And people started to think, “what is going on over there?” [More . . . ]
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has published an unapologetic paean to his war crimes, torture and tortured reasoning in a memoir which he calls; In My Time. Needless to say, some find Mr. Cheney’s alleged memoir a work of fiction and suitable “for supermarket tabloids” and “full of cheap shots.” The book will be out August 30, 2011. Mr. Cheney and his attack-dog daughter, Liz, have launched another campaign to clean up Mr. Cheney’s image but, Mr. Cheney remains one of the most unpopular politicians in American history with an approval rating going towards the single digits. In Mr. Cheney’s book he highlights how he counseled bombing Syria to “restore America’s standing among the Arabs.” Apparently, Mr. Cheney’s plans also included the possibilities of nuking Iraq, Iran and Syria to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to those countries. I wonder if Mr. Cheney’s memoir mentions the secret CIA assassination squads which he set up and then ordered the CIA to not disclose to Congress as required by law or his advocacy of the illegal use of US troops against US citizens on US soil? [More . . . ]