Entries associated with the tag "War":

Jim Holt lays it out so even I can understand it in the London Review of Books:

"It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion."

I wouldn't quote Sam Smith so much if anyone else had as many ideas.

"Military and marketing are both things Americans pride themselves in," he wrote the other day, which made him wonder, "What if we had reacted after 9/11 more like a corporation facing a consumer rebellion than as an army trying to eliminate the enemy?

"Instead we have done absolutely nothing to reduce the 'profound hatred of U.S. citizens' by Muslims and much to increase it, all in the name of something called the war on terror. And we're not just talking about Republicans. Both the Democrats and the media has gone along with a military approach and won't even discuss alternatives in any serious manner.

"But wars are there to be won and I haven't met anyone who expects Osama bin Laden or other guerilla leaders ever to show up on the deck of the contemporary version of the USS Missouri to sign the terms of surrender. Come to think of it that was over 60 years ago and nobody important has been able to do it since.

"The truth is, though nobody talks about it much, countries like the US don't win wars anymore unless the enemy is so small it doesn't count. In fact, the most striking thing about wars is that they simply don't work the way they used to."

Read the whole thing.

Former CIA Middle East officer Robert Baer in Time:

"Strengthening the Administration's case for a strike on Iran, there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking. And what do we do if just the opposite happens — a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. 'IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran.'"

Somewhere along here the Bush administration has gone from wilfully ignorant to batshit crazy. The lesson going back at least to World War II is that bombing doesn't make the bombed population love the bombers, it unites them behind their leaders, no matter how evil.

Speaking of wilful ignorance, Rick Perlstein corrects some right-wing lies about Vietnam here. More here if you need a refresher course.

Of course, the spectacle of a right-wing president tying his foolish war to a liberal president's foolish war is bound to make one look around for alternatives. I have said, and will say, a lot of harsh things about dogmatic libertarianism, but one question libertarians -- unlike conservatives -- can be counted on to ask is, "Is this war really necessary?" The other day the Cato Institute's Jonathan Logan put it this way:

"President Bush's strategy for Iraq amounts to playing for time and hoping for a miracle. Bizarrely, the president has now invoked the Vietnam analogy in an effort to shore updomestic support for the war by reminding us that bad things happened after we left. This is true. It is also worth remembering that U.S. soldiers stopped dying after we left, and that the 'dominoes' that were to have fallen didn't fall. The United States won the Cold War just a decade and a half later. Our defeat in Vietnam did not prevent victory in the Cold War, and defeat in Iraq will not ensure defeat in the struggle against terrorism."

Even with the assistance of Paul Krugman, hilzoy at Obsidian Wings remains bewildered by President Bush's apparent ongoing lack of concern for the troops in Iraq:

"Bush could have included enough funds to fight the war for an entire year in the regular budget, rather than relying on a supplemental [appropriation], which is supposed to be for emergencies in any case. He freely chose not to, and also chose not to pressure the Republican Congress into passing a budget on time. Had he done these things, we would not be having this debate, since the troops would be funded through next October."

Is there some clever strategic reason -- or any precedent -- for funding a war through one supplemental appropriation after another? Or is this yet another case of incompetence and political posturing instead of taking seriously a key responsibility of the Executive Branch?

The really bizarre part is that he threatens to veto the supplemental if it contains so much as an advisory date for withdrawing troops from Iraq -- this from a president who regularly issues signing statements amending or nullifying the bill being signed.

Writing at the History News Network, Christopher McKnight Nichols slaps down several presidents and those troglodytes who still worship at the shrine of Mars:

"The domino theory [that if Vietnam went Communist the rest of southern Asia was doomed to do the same] failed by the standard of its own predictions. Communism never took hold in Indonesia, Thailand, or more importantly, in any of the other large countries in the region, most notably, India. There was no cascade effect triggered by the U.S. departure from South Vietnam. The United States continued as an economic and military power. And now, America and Vietnam are trading partners, which President Bush should know as he visited that nation last year. Southeast Asia is a vibrant engine of global commerce and the region has closer ties to the United States now than at any time in the past."

Thus with the liberals' falsehood-based and unwinnable war from the 1960s and 1970s. Now the Cheney administration is peddling the same theory in order to escalate the conservatives' falsehood-based and unwinnable war in Iraq. Nichols doesn't say, but what's up with imagining whole countries as dominos? Is that thought, or a substitute for it?

Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory has a thought that won't cheer up the "values voters" among us:

"In the course of all the reading I did for my book of the pre-Iraq War 'debates' this country had both on television and in print, what is most striking in retrospect is the casual and breezy tone which America collectively now discusses and thinks about war as a foreign policy option, standing inconspicuously next to all of the other options. There is really no strong resistance to it, no sense that it is a supremely horrible and tragic thing in all cases to undertake -- and particularly to start. Gone almost completely from our mainstream political discourse is horror over war. The most one hears is some cursory and transparently insincere -- almost bored -- lip service to its being a 'last resort.'"

Greenwald thinks the first gulf war was a turning point -- when we got to "feel the power and strength that comes from triumph with none of the costs."

(The commenters are pretty good here; one recommends Andrew J. Bacevich's The New American Militarism, which I haven't seen.)

University of Chicago historian of theology W. Clark Gilpin offers a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King that's still relevant, by way of the University of Chicago magazine's Uchiblogo: "There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward [Selma, Alabama, Sheriff] Jim Clark,' but will curse and damn you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.'"

There are intelligent conservatives -- some of them comment here. But North Carolina Republican Robin Hayes ain't one of them. He thinks we can win the war in Iraq by spreading "Christian principles" there: "Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the savior."

History suggests otherwise. Fred Clark explains at Slacktivist (where the comments are good too): "As a Christian, I wish there were something to his suggestion that if only everybody was a Christian there wouldn't be any more war, but that simply hasn't proven the case. Despite all that stuff in the Sermon on the Mount, we Christians have a pretty bellicose track record. Historically, the group of Christians that probably most resembles the meek peacemakers Jesus commanded his followers to be is the Amish. And while they may be, themselves, a peaceful people, their history is anything but. The Anabaptists faced lethally violent persecution -- all at the hands of other Christians.

"The Amish were never truly safe until they got to America.... Only a secular nation, one with an explicit prohibition against the establishment of religion, could provide a safe haven for the Christlike peace churches."

If you don't have the Sandbox milblog in your regular blogroll, this post from Capt. Doug Traversa, who's stationed in Afghanistan, might inspire you to visit. In the midst of a commentary about the colorful "jingle trucks" he regularly spots, there's this money quote:  

"Since we are never allowed out of our vehicles unless we are on a base . . ."

Sure is a good thing we're winning. 

The op-ed page of today's Tribune features a syndicated column by Washington Post pundit Charles Krauthammer. Either the Trib didn't notice or didn't care, but the column (which ran in last Friday's Post) is based on a flagrant lie, which was detected eons ago in blogosphere time, first by conservative writer Andrew Sullivan on Friday and then by political scientist/blogger Brendan Nyhan on Saturday.

Krauthammer writes: "Our objectives in Iraq were twofold and always simple: depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government."

Amazingly, Krauthammer airbrushes the claim that Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction," the notoriously false rationale used by the Cheney administration during the run-up to the war -- and echoed by tame columnists at the time. Fortunately for the rest of us, it's not 1984, so Nyhan can refute Krauthammer simply by quoting his old columns, which dwelled obsessively on WMD.

Hey, it's the Trib's newspaper, the Trib's reputation, and the Trib's stock price (not necessarily in that order). But why should the rest of us settle for sloppy seconds that were full of E. coli the first time around?

Rick Shenkman writes at the POTUS blog on the History News Network, where he recently identified "the restaurant law of history":

"Anytime we lose a war you can be sure of one thing. You will suddenly see a lot of new restaurants pop up around the country (and especially in Washington, D.C.). Who will be running them? The losers in our wars. Americans have grown accustomed to eating Vietnamese food. Soon, I'd bet, we'll be eating food from Mesopotamia."

Economist Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek worries about protectionism:

"Many newly elected Democrats oppose both war and free trade. They should avoid this inconsistency. Research -- especially by Solomon Polachek -- finds that trade promotes peace. Commerce unites people economically (it's bad for the bottom line to kill your customers) and culturally (trade with foreigners demands that you better understand them and that they better understand you)."

From the abstract of the downloadable 95-page paper (PDF) cited: "A doubling of trade leads to a 20-percent diminution of belligerence. This result is robust under various specifications, and it is upheld when adjusting for causality using cross-section and time-series techniques." As far as I can tell, this is a discussion paper and has not yet been published in an actual journal.

Richard Stern, now Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus in English Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago, tells a truth about war that most of us aren't old enough to remember:

"Like almost every boy in my class [during World War II], I did such things as collected and rolled tin foil into supposedly usable balls and when in the country, had a small "victory garden" where I raised a few radishes. My mother rolled bandages down at the Red Cross. My uncles were either in war-related businesses (the silk business which was involved in parachute making) or volunteering their time at the Office of Price Administration. Uniforms were everywhere, the trains were packed with soldiers, the stations tense with heartrending farewells. Everyone you knew was somehow connected with the war: Your cousins were fighting in North Africa, Sicily, the Pacific; your friends' older brothers and parents were far away and mailing the thin blue email letters back home. Almost everyone followed the day's battleground events, charted the progress or retreats on the map, knew the casualty figures, cheered and booed the political leaders in the newsreels. Total war.

"Today, the war is something on the television news, the occasional press conferences, the newspapers. Few are in uniform. I know no one fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan . . . . In World War II, President Roosevelt's sons were in the army. Indeed, 18-year-old G. H.W. Bush volunteered as a pilot and postponed his life at Yale. Is there anyone in his son's large family serving in the military?"

Read the whole thing at Open University. 

The "war on terror" isn't a struggle for national survival -- as NPR Check points out, it's a way to put the country on a permanent war footing and thereby to turn the constitutionally limited office of president an omnipotent Commander in Chief.  If this had been a real war, the president would have publicly asked his wealthy constituents to sacrifice their tax cuts as his nonwealthy constituents are giving their lives -- and he would have continued to receive the bipartisan support he briefly enjoyed after the 9/11 disaster.  

"1. It is the morning of the day on which you will die. For breakfast, you:

    (a) have a hearty breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee that your wife cooked for you in the kitchen of your Victorian townhouse.

    (b) enjoy eggs benedict on a rice cake with a side helping of tofu granola and wheatgrass, and a steaming mug of soy latte double decaf.

    (c) smoke five Camel Light cigarettes and chug a lukewarm can of 'Columbian taste' coffee that was really made in a factory in Saudi Arabia.

    (d) Noon is too late for breakfast."

From Sgt. "Roy Batty"at the Sandbox milblog.  Read the whole thing.

As with lying and torture, war so rarely works the way you want it to:

"The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and-awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups."

That's lefty historian Howard Zinn, but his argument doesn't require that you agree with his positions on other issues.

In the same vein, Billmon distills Charles Krauthammer's latest opinion down to its essential absurdity:

"America must attack Iran even if sets the Middle East on fire, because the Iranians are crazy and might set the Middle East on fire."

As is often the case, women have a firmer grasp of these matters, from ancient Greek drama to present-day Colombian reality.

The indispensable Billmon points us to a sober and methodical 26-page report by retired U.S. Air Force colonel Sam Gardiner for the Century Foundation, "The End of the 'Summer of Diplomacy':  Assessing U.S. Military Options on Iran." (PDF)

It's a quick and easy read, but not a pleasant one. In a sentence: War with Iran will accomplish nothing we want, and a lot that we don't.

"At the end of the path that the administration seems to have chosen [systematic air bombardment], will the issues with Iran have been resolved? No. Will the region be better off? No. Is it clear Iran will abandon its nuclear program? No. On the other hand, can Iran defeat the United States militarily? No. Will the United States force a regime change on Iran? In all probability it will not. Will the economy of the United States suffer? In all probability it will. Will the United States have weakened its position in the Middle East? Yes. Will the United States have reduced its influence in the world? Yes."

The difference between presidents like Bush and professionals like Gardiner is the difference between a bully and a fighter. A bully wants to (watch someone else) fight. A fighter knows how to fight when he or she has to, and knows how to determine when he or she has to.

Bishop Thomas G. Doran of the Rockford (Illinois) Diocese writes that the seven secular sacraments are "abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation," according to his August 11 column in its diocesan newspaper, the Observer. (Shockingly, I've received only one of the seven.)

The bishop's argument about abortion appeals to generally held values rather than dogma: "What we have to remember is that violence breeds violence. . . . Those who have killed millions under their mother's hearts cannot be expected to balk at a mere few thousand killed in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Somalia, in Darfur, in Bosnia, in Madrid, in London, in Baghdad, in Beirut, in Washington, in New York."

Hmm. If this argument were true, wouldn't you expect that pro-lifers--including the nation's Catholic bishops en masse--would be leading the antiwar movement in this country?

And wouldn't you expect that the few remaining supporters of the U.S. war in Iraq would be pro-choice activists?

In the real world, of course, we know who wants to stay the course, and who doesn't "balk at a mere few thousand killed." Is it possible that the bishop is criticizing President Bush, on the grounds that war-making may turn him into an abortionist?

Or does he just have the driest sense of humor this side of Jon Stewart?

(Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels.)

I'm adding Morning Martini to my already-overloaded RSS feed on the strength of this post alone (and a hearty hat tip to Bring It On): 

"Let’s say you have a nine year old son and I have one too. We are neighbors. We look outside and see our kids fighting. They are hitting one another with big pieces of lumberand both are bleeding. Which do we do first? Do we try to figure out a way to keep them from fighting in the future, as they continue to beat the hell out of one another? Or do we stop the fight, get the kids cleaned up, see to their wounds, and then work on away to stop them from fighting in the future?"

For years the Neighborhood Works, the newsletter of Chicago's Center for Neighborhood Technology, ran on its masthead the maxim, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," signaling the organization's ongoing suspicion of one-size-fits-all approaches to urban problems.

Now Jim Wallis, writing in Sojourners, uses the phrase in a parallel way (registration req'd) to critique what passes these days for American foreign policy:

"If we don't know how to solve a problem, we just fight," Wallis writes. "Diplomacy has become a weak word to those who run our foreign policy and, in the House debate on Iraq in June, Republicans made numerous references to those who are 'afraid to fight.' Right on cue, Fox News Sunday's Brit Hume accused Democrats of being a party that just doesn't like to fight. And according to the neoconservatives masquerading as journalists, such as Hume and William Kristol, continuous fighting is the only foreign policy that makes any sense.

". . . Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have the same strong preference for fighting over talking. If they had their way, we would have fought or would still be fighting several wars by now--all at the same time--in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Iran at least, and probably against North Korea, too, if they thought we could win the war. They act as if talking and negotiating with potential adversaries is just a waste of time."

Andrew Sullivan, who comes at these issues from a very different place than Wallis, reflects on George Washington's renunciation of power at the end of the Revolution and again after eight years as president, and makes a similar point: "This capacity for restraint, for embracing the limits of power rather than its ends, is at the core of constitutional democracy (and, I would argue, conservatism, properly understood). I wish our current leaders grasped it better. Sharing power is often more powerful . . ."

Where are the presidential and congressional candidates, of either party, who can make this non-obvious message seem just as American as pulling a hammer from your holster and banging away?