newsrackblog.com

Via Truthout:

The Obama administration plans to ask Congress for an extra $33 billion to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to an Associated Press report.

The $33 billion would be on top of a record request for $708 billion for the Defense Department next year.

Compare the outlays Obama wants for Haiti:

The United States armed forces are also on their way to support this effort. Several Coast Guard cutters are already there providing everything from basic services like water, to vital technical support for this massive logistical operation. Elements of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division will arrive today. We’re also deploying a Marine Expeditionary Unit, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, and the Navy’s hospital ship, the Comfort.

And today, I’m also announcing an immediate investment of $100 million to support our relief efforts. This will mean more of the life-saving equipment, food, water and medicine that will be needed. This investment will grow over the coming year as we embark on the long-term recovery from this unimaginable tragedy.

These are great things. I was pleased, even downright proud that Obama deployed so much so quickly to help Haitians, and knew he could count on everyone’s support to do so. (Well, almost everyone’s.)

But that impressive sounding $100,000,000 is a mere 0.3 percent of the $33,000,000,000 amount we’re going to add to the financial sinkholes and military quagmires called Iraq and Afghanistan.

Question: wouldn’t it be safer, smarter, cheaper, and even (dare I say it) just a lot more fun and more satisfying to divide the Afghanistan/Iraq outlay by, say, 4, and multiply the Haiti commitment by as much?

Question: Wouldn’t it make more sense to help rebuild a friendly nation close to our shores from natural catastrophe, than to rebuild ones on the other side of the planet after bombing and killing their inhabitants?

Question:Wouldn’t it make more sense to redeploy our servicemen and women out of countries where they’re not wanted, to a place where they’re wanted desperately?

Question: which makes us safer in the long run — to earn the thanks of a country for rescuing it from catastrophe in time of need, to put it back on its feet so its inhabitants don’t need to emigrate, or to earn the enmity of families who’ve lost children, husbands, fathers to a war we’ve brought to them?

As the health care “debate” lurches forward under the expert guidance of our Democratic leadership, my thoughts turn unbidden to the past.

How vividly I remember how we were counseled not to upset our sensitive Republican friends with any prospect of impeachment or subpoenas or prosecution, or of anything at all that might hold them or their chieftains even a little bit accountable for anything.

No, even though it was our most fundamental birthright to hold our rulers accountable when they break laws and break faith and break oaths, we were looking forward, not looking back.  And that was because we were looking forward to that “progressive place” Pelosi prattled on about once — serious liberal Democrats like Harold Meyerson and Chris Van Hollen and Eric Alterman nodding sagely at her side.  Well, Alterman came later, but I’m being allegorical here.

When we got there, she told us, there’d be a delicious yummy exit from Iraq and then! a delicious yummy climate change bill and then! a delicious yummy health care plan!  It was a wonderful story!  Instead of having to fight mean Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, we’d just wait for them to go away and we’d have a much easier time with all their friends.  Why, we might all look back on everything and just laugh at how silly we’d been!

So we gave away our birthright, and now I suspect that instead of getting anything delicious and yummy, we’re going to get the mess of pottage I understand you can expect when you do that.  Although there was nothing in the old story about the Iraq surge and FISA amendment and all the other sh*t sandwiches we got to eat first.  Which just goes to show those old stories never get it exactly right, but they can still get pretty darned close.

If so, I imagine people will be saying, “mmm! pottage!” or “you know, for a mess of pottage, it’s not half bad!” And they’ll say it with uniquely American Homer Simpson voices.  And I’ll be banging the desk with my head.

UPDATE, via Jed Lewison at DailyKos:

In the previous post, I took up some of Aziz Poonawalla’s defense of Obama’s decision to resist the release of photos showing past detainee abuse — principally the notion that the risks posed by the release were particularly great, or outweighed the benefits. As noted there, my original comment didn’t fully address the arguments Aziz made in his second post, “release the prisoner abuse photos - but not right now“;  I attempt to do so here. OK, just release them later When exactly? Aziz (emphasis his own):

These photos will need to be released someday, and there will indeed need to be a full accounting and formal congressional invetigation, backed by force of law, regarding American policy towards detainees during the Bush Administration. However, with the resurgent Taliban in Pakistan (incidentally increasing its nuclear stockpile), the utter helplessness of Mayor Karzai against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the increasing power of Al Shabab in Somalia, total transparency can wait.

It is not altogether unfair to reply to this, “That is, never.”  It is quite fair to reply, “that’s not what Obama said”:

…the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken. It’s therefore my belief that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.

End of story.  However generous Aziz’s timetable for the release of the photos may be, there’s no discernible timetable whatsoever in Obama’s remarks.  The photos, so Obama would have us believe, are at most Appendix C material in some dusty military history book thirty years from now.  He has no plans to release them.  Ever. But Obama’s critical argument — and one that Aziz repeatedly echoes — is that only a “small number of individuals” were involved.  Aziz formulates the distinction as criminality versus official, explict policy:

…we must draw a clean and clear distinction between what happened at Abu Ghraib and the official, explicitly sanctioned policy of waterboarding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The former were criminal actions that were not sanctioned by any military or government official, though of course the sheer sadistic brutality of the abuse gave rise to typical conspiracy theories.  [...] To attempt to force the issue now, by drawing a false equivalence between torture policy and criminal abuse, is to undermine the very real war going on, one in which ordinary muslims are still the primary victims, at the hands of those who do far worse than anything we have done.

Abu Ghraib was the fruit of the Bush/Cheney torture tree
But that equivalence is not false.   The connections between what happened in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and the torture, humiliation, and abuse at Guantanamo are manifold, direct and undeniable.  Officers like Major General Geoffrey Miller and Captain Carolyn Wood who oversaw the torture and abuse at Guantanamo and Bagram, respectively, were in leadership roles for Iraqi detainee operations (including Abu Ghraib) before the abuses there took place, and relied on guidance from the highest levels of the Pentagon to authorize their deeds.  As early as 2004, Miller confirmed the use of abusive techniques including

hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation and depriving prisoners not only of dignity, but of fundamental human needs, such as warmth, water and food. The US commander in charge of military jails in Iraq, Major General Geoffrey Miller, has confirmed that a battery of 50-odd special “coercive techniques” can be used against enemy detainees. The general, who previously ran the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, said his main role was to extract as much intelligence as possible.

As a summary (by Brian Knowlton of the New York Times) of a Senate Armed Services Report declassified in April puts it:

Read the rest of this entry »

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, things appear to be going swimmingly, if this video is any indication:

Since nothing to the contrary has surfaced since the video first appeared on YouTube in late January, I’ll assume it really is of recent vintage. Writing for “Foreign Policy,” Thomas Ricks mentions the video and declares earnestly that there’s a right way to do Iraq, and the wrong way, and that this is the wrong way gosh darn it: “everything I’ve seen about Iraqis tells me that publicly disparaging them is not the way to go.”

Well, sure; I don’t think that’s some sort of tribal peculiarity of Iraqis either. But it’s also possible there *is* no right way to “do” Iraq, and that’s what this officer is up against, assuming he cares. “Raise your hand if you’re in the Mahdi militia” is pretty much the definition of admitting you have no idea what’s going on with the people in front of you, you know you never will, you’ve given up pretending you will, and all that’s left is to make an Armed Forces Clueless Home Video about it.

I’m tempted to excerpt it at some length, but it really has to be heard to be believed.  This may be a particularly bad day, or bad assignment.  But it seems to me we’d best be out of there as quickly as possible.  And if it were me, I’d just keep going and get the rest of the “residual” force out of there on the same timetable.  I’m not sure Obama will have much choice.

=====
EDIT, 3/12: title changed to try to avoid the wrong kind of Google hits.

For Nell: a collection of YouTube videos of George W. Bush departing the inauguration ceremony by helicopter — I’d say my favorite is the shoe throw one — plus a bonus one of some network twits tut-tutting when he got booed.

Yes, I booed him. Sayonara, jerk — I hope next time I’ll be seeing you in videos they’ll be from Holland — or Leavenworth. I have a dream — that one day you’ll be judged not for the color of your skin, not even for the skimpy content of your character, but for the crimes that you’ve committed.

=====
UPDATE, 1/28: Nice photoshop job. ( Via Cara)

A look back at at my ticket-splitting, effort-splitting, and other split decision-making in the 2008 elections.

—

Virginia Senator Jim Webb had one of the memorable quips of the campaign in October. Speaking in Roanoke to an Obama rally, Webb said McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for veep reminded him of the line from a country song, “I know what I was doing, but what was I thinking?”

Whatever McCain’s motivations were, though, my own choices might seem equally hard to explain.  I wound up working hard for a vice presidential candidate who was instrumental in passing the Bankruptcy Bill; for a presidential candidate who went back on his word and voted for a FISA Amendment Act featuring telecom company immunity, and who arguably took the oxygen out of a favored candidate’s campaign when he promised to stick to a publicly financed campaign — which he obviously did not do.

I thereby worked on behalf of a party that had effectively abandoned opposition to the Iraq War in 2007 — despite sweeping back to power on that promise — and on behalf of a party that had stonewalled pleas to hold the architects of that war, of torture, of warrantless surveillance, and more accountable by impeachment.

Meanwhile, though, I joined in a campaign for Gordon Clark, a Green Party candidate who wound up with around 2 percent of the vote.  I supported that campaign with time, writing, and even some money — with the net effect, particularly of the writing, perhaps making me persona non grata to a Congressman I’d frequently praised on this site.

So what do I have to show for it?  What explains the mixture of satisfaction and regret I feel?
Read the rest of this entry »

While the economy has taken center stage in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign, Iraq remains a critical issue as well — the war costs billions of dollars each month, and costs American and Iraqi lives, limbs, and health as well.

The “Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq” was developed by congressional candidates Darcy Burner, Donna Edwards, and others as a campaign platform and legislative agenda. For more on the plan — which seeks both to end the war in Iraq, and prevent failures like it in the future — follow the link and/or see my blog posts about it.  The plan calls for

• Ending U.S. military action in Iraq
• Using U.S. diplomatic power
• Addressing humanitarian concerns
• Restoring our Constitution
• Restoring our military
• Restoring independence to the media
• Creating a new, U.S.-centered energy policy

…with specific legislative proposals for each goal.  Here’s a quick rundown on how some of the candidates who developed the plan are doing.

• Donna Edwards (MD-04): an incumbent by now, and a prohibitive favorite — no Republican has received more than 25% of the vote in this district since 1994.
• Eric Massa (NY-29): Up 51-44, (10/7/08, SurveyUSA)
• Tom Perriello (VA-05): Down 42-55 (10/7/08, SurveyUSA); has gained 12 points in 2 months
• Chellie Pingree (ME-01): Up 44-33 (10/2/08, PolitickerME);  22% undecided!
• Jared Polis (CO-02): “heavy favorite” (9/10/08, PolitickerCO)
• George Fearing (WA-04): can’t find recent poll information; debate on 10/16 attended by about 200 people (TriCityHerald.com)
• Larry Byrnes (FL-14): out earlier this summer.
• Stephen Harrison (NY-13): out in September primary (9/9/08, BeyondThePolls.com).
• Sam Bennett (PA-15): “Republican favored” (CQ Politics); recent mistake about the solvency of two banks in a televised debate was blurred and muted at Bennett’s request by the broadcasting TV station — probably not a good development.
• Darcy Burner (WA-08): Up 49-44 (10/14/08, DCCC); had been down 44-54 (9/9/08, SUSA).

Obviously, all of them deserve our help and many are in close races. To help with a non-tax-deductible donation, go to the Responsible Plan ActBlue web site and give to any or all of them.

=====
UPDATE, EDITS, 10/16; Bennett, Harrison, Fearing information updated.

This is kind of brilliant:

The total cost of the Iraq War will be over $3 trillion, according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard public finance professor Linda Bilmes.  That’s enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every household in America.

Here are some other things we could’ve done for the price of the Iraq War.

…and each “War or Car?” blog post is an example. Some recent ones:

10/02/2008: Buy a California home every 20 seconds since Greenspan promoted alternative mortgages
09/29/2008: Give every American a community college economics degree
09/26/2008: Make everybody in Philly a Scottish baron
09/25/2008: Buy each panda an Arleigh Burke class destroyer
09/13/2008: Build Large Hadron Colliders all the way up the West Coast
09/11/2008: Put a tank staffed by Petraeus duplicates on every square mile of Afghanistan:

For the price of the Iraq War, we could’ve hunted down Osama Bin Laden by placing a fully equipped M1 Abrams battle tank on every square mile of Afghanistan and staffing them entirely with duplicates of General Petraeus.

The heavily armored 67-ton M1 Abrams battle tank, which carries four crew members, is the principal combat tank of the American armed forces. A fully equipped M1 Abrams costs $4.30 million. General David Petraeus, who oversaw all US forces in Iraq, earns $180,000 per year. The area of Afghanistan is 251,772 square miles Putting an M1 Abrams on each square mile of Afghanistan and staffing them entirely with Petraeus duplicates drawing a salary equal to his would cost $1.26 trillion, which is less than half of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes’ estimate of $3 trillion for the cost of the Iraq War.

I didn’t get to see the knockout blow by Obama last night I confess I’d been crossing my fingers for; instead, the debate was a vivid demonstration of how narrow the field of debate is, and/or how unwilling Obama is to run outside the hash marks and set up some of that change he’s been promising. Examples (debate transcript via the New York Times):

I actually believe that we need missile defense, because of Iran and North Korea and the potential for them to obtain or to launch nuclear weapons  [...]

Senator McCain is absolutely right that the violence has been reduced as a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and our military families.  [...]

And to countries like Georgia and the Ukraine, I think we have to insist that they are free to join NATO if they meet the requirements, and they should have a membership action plan immediately to start bringing them in.  [...]

[Iran has] gone from zero centrifuges to 4,000 centrifuges to develop a nuclear weapon.

To the contrary: if we’re ever hit by a nuclear weapon in the U.S., it will almost certainly arrive here not by missile, but in a container on a ship, truck, or train. The surge didn’t reduce violence, the successful conclusion to ethnic cleansing and al-Sadr’s decision to pocket his gains did. Fast-tracking Georgia into NATO is of less than no value to American interests compared to locking down loose nukes, something Obama said in the next breath was something he also wanted; he may have to choose. And while I seem to be the last person on the East Coast who remembers it, it was not one year ago that a National Intelligence Estimate stated, and I quote, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.“

Even on Iraq, Obama couldn’t forebear to lead his criticisms with the observation that “We have weakened our capacity to project power around the world because we have viewed everything through this single lens,” as if our capacity to project power is itself the goal and point of American foreign policy.

I think Josh Marshall misses the point here: “I know that many Obama supporters are disappointed that he passed on various opportunities to deliver a smackdown that McCain couldn’t recover from. But having watched the guy for 18 months now, for better and worse, that’s not who he is.“  I realize that Obama is temperamentally not inclined to go for the jugular, and that may even be smart politics.  As hilzoy argued, his graciousness compared to McCain’s rudeness may be the dominant impression that many take away from the debate — something that burnishes his “bipartisan, get it done” credentials (not to mention his “not an angry old coot” credentials) much more than McCain’s.

The point wasn’t that Obama failed to smack McCain down, though I wish he had — say, on voting against the Webb G.I. bill, given McCain’s teary praise for vets.  (Bonus: would have got McCain mad, always good to watch for those just tuning in.)  No, it was actually and simply that he agreed on too much with McCain. As Jim Henley wrote after the debate:

As a symptom of the constriction of elite opinion, the debate was instructive less for the answers than even the questions. “Foreign policy” consists of wars and nothing but wars. It’s about whom you bomb or don’t, and whom you do or don’t convince to help you bomb someone.

The debate certainly also proved that there’s plenty of important stuff Obama is right about and McCain is wrong about.  But even if and when Obama wins this election, that will not be the end of all that’s wrong with our military and foreign policy.

Not all of that is Obama’s fault by any means.  Tonight, I saw a video by a group heretofore unknown to me: United Against Nuclear Iran.  It featured lots of ominous music, and repeated yet again the claim that Iran was building nuclear weapons. The video has one Richard Sokolsky talking about military measures as a way of stopping Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions. And while known neocons Fouad Ajami and James Woolsey were two of the talking heads involved, so were ex-Clintonistas Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke.

Million Doors for Peace on Saturday. Obama on Sunday. Today must be Monday.

I only knocked on about 80 doors this weekend, but on Sunday it seemed like every d…elightful one of them was on the 3d floor of IdentApartmentComplexVille in Dumfries, VA.

In both cases, I was working from walking lists — lists of selected names in address order.  The common thread was that both lists — as usual — bore only an approximate relation to reality.  On Saturday, I was in my own neighborhood, and the names were of infrequent or new voters.  They turned out to be mainly — duh — kids who had left for college.  I had enough presence of mind to ask their parents whether they might sign on to the MD4P petition  to Congress (out of Iraq in one year), and a fair number did.  Most importantly, I got three or four (potential) volunteers for future work that way, vs. only one off the walking list.

Dumfries, VA Obama HQ.
Originally uploaded by Thomas Nephew;
see also slideshow.

For some reason, I was less mentally flexible the next day, though the problem was a little different.  In this case I was in a cookie cutter low-to-middle-price range apartment complex development in Dumfries, Virginia.  By whatever criterion the names were selected here (perhaps also newly registered and/or infrequent voters), turnover was high — and this time, instead of doing something with Mr. or Ms. Surprise NewlyMovedIn at the door, I just gave them the packet of literature and moved on.  The difference, I think, was (a) that I was maybe a little more tired and stupid on Sunday, (b) I had it in my head from the briefing that I was only after answers about the names on my walking list, and (c) that I didn’t have any designated piece of paper to put Mr. or Ms. Surprise NewlyMovedIn on.  (Though I might have crossed out the Mr. or Ms. NotThereAnymore and just written in the new name.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.)  I did get one volunteer and a couple of strong Obama supporters, but my unstupid partner did much better with fewer doors.

Well, I’ll do better next time.  Now to bed.

=====
UPDATE, 9/22: Prior “Million Doors for Peace” posts here. Also, eRobin at factesque provides a video of how things went in a Pennsyvlania “Million Doors for Peace” canvass.  Pretty well! — 3 hours, 257 contacts, 11 volunteers.
UPDATE, 9/22: SurveyUSA has Obama up 51-45 in Virginia, though results are among voting age; likely voters made up 80% of the tally. Still, how about this: “Among women, Obama led by 6 points before Sarah Palin was named to the GOP ticket, now leads by 16.” Survey taken 9/19-21.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE, 9/22: I’d heard of this, from Yale U.’s Brett M., but here’s the specific finding and reference, via Sean Quinn (”fivethirtyeight.com”): “For every twelve voters who you talk to at their doors, one voter goes and votes who would not otherwise have voted. If you’re asking: “how can I be most effective in helping my candidate win the election?” then an organizer’s answer is going to be: knock on doors.” (Source: Getting Out the Vote in Local Elections: Results from Six Door-to-Door Canvassing Experiments. Donald P. Green, Alan S. Gerber, David W. Nickerson; Yale University.)