Priorities

I spotted this quote by Tom Friedman on Daily Dish:

China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience...; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry... Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.
The story doesn't end with this helpful and insightful quote. Perhaps, the above quote is an attempt by Friedman to attempt to redeem himself for his pro-war rhetoric from prior years. He has himself to thank for the fact that the U.S. warmongering mentality has caused us to fall so far behind China. And we continue to fall behind China because we can't wake up from our nightmare in which relatively few people armed with unsophisticated weapons such as box-cutters are deemed more dangerous than the Soviet Union at its height, armed with thousands of nuclear warheads. Thus, we will continue to spend more than half of our federal tax revenue on military pursuits. Our exuberant and delusional warmongering is killing our economy and our future.

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Our overreaction to 9/11

Ted Koppel reminds us that we have been tricked into destroying ourselves, and wonders whether we will ever have the courage and wisdom to stop:

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams. It did not have to be this way. . . . Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish -- and how we have accommodated him.

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A question for President Obama

I wonder, which is a better recruitment tool for potential terrorists: the burning of a Koran or the following news items from the past month or so:

  • Civilian death toll in Afghanistan "soared" by more than 30% since 2009
  • Taliban asks for independent commission to investigate civilian deaths, insisting that they are not to blame. U.S. says they don't want to grant Taliban legitimacy by negotiating with them, stonewalls the issue.
  • 12 American soldiers on a secret "kill team" have been (allegedly) caught murdering Afghan civilians for sport. They then (allegedly) took pictures posing with the bodies, mutilated them, and kept fingers of the dead as souvenirs. They were turned in by a fellow GI, who was then beaten and told to keep his mouth shut and stop "snitching". Originally five soldiers were arrested, now seven more have been arrested as part of the cover-up and assault on the whistleblower.

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The real cost of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

What is the cost of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? The cost, which will continue to mount for decades, is staggering, even insane. It wasn't $50 B, as W stated; it's already in the trillions. Here are the numbers from the Washington Post. The reason for the U.S. invasion and occupation? Unknown. The deleterious effect on the soldiers, their families and the U.S. economy? Long term and devastating. For the hawks, it was fun going in with all those fancy weapons blazing, but they are not offering any ideas as far as cleaning up this catastrophic mess. And those hawks have absolutely nothing to offer to the massive number of Iraqi refugees, who have spilled all over the Middle East, placing an enormous burden on Syria and Jordan. And combat is not "over," per the recent lies of the Obama Administration. And the corrupt corporate media is, for the most part, not calling out the Obama Administration for this recent fabrication any more than they confronted the U.S. for the fictitious "reasons" for invading in the first place. The media excels at serving as official stenographer for U.S. politicians whenever the topic is war (and see this piece on a documentary by Phil Donahue, and this article regarding Amy Goodman's views about the additional failures of the media). The corporate media bears thus much of the blame for the bleak economic future of the U.S.

Continue ReadingThe real cost of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.