Walter Pincus wonders how Americans lost the will to pay for our wars

The unholy troika -- Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney: No, if they were on Death Row where they belong, that wouldn't solve the debt problem they did so much to create. But what if they and all their war-profiteering friends, relations, and cronies were to voluntarily make restitution for all their ill-gotten gains derived from the troika's crimes?

"The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represented the first time that a U.S. president did not seek new taxes to cover the fighting. Supported by a GOP-led House and Senate from 2001 through 2006, and then just the GOP-run House, Bush raised the debt ceiling seven times through 2008, almost doubling it, from about $6 trillion to $11.3 trillion."

-- Walter Pincus, in a WaPo "Fine Print" column,
"Debt and deficit lessons from 1917"

by Ken

For a couple of days now I've been trying to figure out how to write about Dexter Filkins's timely piece in the new (Dec. 17) New Yorker, "General Principles: How good was David Petraeus?." It's a question that's been on my mind for a while, and I can't think of any one better equipped to tackle it than frequent war-zone correspondent Filkins. (Tip: For once, a piece I want to talk about is actually available on newyorker.com. Why not just read it yourself?)

One of the things that has gotten in the way of writing about the Petraeus piece is that Filkins lands us in so many crucial "side" issues, like for example the mind-bogglingly stupidiity and savagery and grinding, all-encompassing incompetence of the mighty triumvirate of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld that got us into the Iraq quagmire -- measures of stupidity, savagery, and incompetence that haven't even begun to be reckoned with. If the had, the three of them would by now be sitting on Death Row, ideally in a special Gunatánamo version featuring the kind of humane treatment they cooked up for the hordes of indiscriminately arrested nobodies rounded up on their watch for no good reason whatsoever. In this special Death Row I'm imagining, the architects of this ideological psychosis would be specially not-tortured, in just the way that they assured us we don't torture prisoners. In fact, I would like to see them not-tortured for at least several hours a day, until they signed affidavits apologizing for having been born and turning over all their assets, and the assets of anyone else which trace back to their stewardship, to begin repaying the massive bill that finally came due once they were safely the hell out of office.

Drawing on Thomas Ricks's The Generals, Filkins paints a vivid picture of the imbecility and incompetence of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika's planning for ward and the incompetence of the military forces the Big Three threw at Iraq. And unfortunately the answer to the question of how good General Petraeus really was turns out to be that on the whole in Iraq he was good enough to largely get Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld off the hook for the true monstrousness of their actual record, which should make them amont the most hated figures ever to hold public office in this country.

Talk about irony! It's thanks to Petraeus that it's possible for right-wingers to pretend that the Bush regime's invasion of Iraq was actually vindicated by subsequent events. But of course it's highly unlikely in any event that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would have paid any price, let alone the price they deserved to pay, for what they did in Iraq, because the judging is done by right-wingers who have officially abandoned any connection to any standard of truth. I mean, these people really believe that their mendacious and delusional fun-house-mirror version of reality has official standing, and that they have a God-given right to lie at all times, large and small, without any limit whatsoever.

I always feel that I'm mostly talking to myself when I repeat the (to me) obvious reality that today every word out of the mouth out of every right-winger is a lie. However, I got a genuine lift the other day from Dan Froomkin's HuffPost report the other day, "How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign," based on conversations with that indomitable conservative-but-sane DC duo of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein --

[A]ccording to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital's media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media's fear of being seen as taking sides.

"The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth," said Mann, who has spent nearly three decades as a congressional scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution.

"I saw some journalists struggling to avoid the trap of balance and I knew they were struggling with it -- and with their editors," said Mann. "But in general, I think overall it was a pretty disappointing performance."

"I can't recall a campaign where I've seen more lying going on -- and it wasn't symmetric," said Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who's been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, "but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top." . . .

(The "publicly concluded" link, by the way, is to an op-ed piece that Mann and Ornstein penned for the Washington Post last April, "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem.")

Really, the way the current "negotiations" over the fiscal-cliff situation should go is this: Democrats, who admittedly have far from clean hands in these matters, should nevertheless point out at every "negotiating" session: "Every word out of your mouths is a lie. Either stop lying or blow your brains out and see if it's possible to have you replaced by people who at least know what truth is." And then they should appear in front of the TV cameras and say: "Regrettably no progress was made today because every word out of the mouths of every Republican is a lie, and there are apparently no Republicans who are not pathological liars. This is a problem."


MEANWHILE, WALTER PINCUS POINTS OUT THE
FINANCIAL CHICANERY OF THE BUSH REGIMISTAS

Again, it's really a shame that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld aren't in their tiny Death Row torture chambers cells to read today's WaPo piece by "Fine Print" columnist Walter Pincus, "Debt and deficit lessons from 1917," which points to one of the crucial ways the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika was able to get away with its Iraq and Afghanistan penis-lengthening exercises: the fact that so much of it could be done without paying for it. Of course the consequence was that at the same time that they were working so hard to crash the economy in other ways, they saw to it that these largely uncounted billions of dollars were hemorrhaging without general public attention. This is one of the crucial reasons why we have so much debt, but the very same oligarchs who watched silently while it was rung up now have the unmitigated gall to tell us that our irreducible economic problem is those dreadful "entitlements" that the takers-not-makers are soaking supposedly up.

(I didn't say that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should be the only ones in our new Guantánamo Death Row.)

Pincus invites us to go back in time.

As some Republicans again threaten to use the debt limit statute next year to leverage protection of tax rates for the wealthy, it's worth going back 95 years to see how Americans viewed taxes and spending when that law passed.

The statute was born out of the need to pay for government spending from our entrance into World War I. George W. Bush's White House didn’t consider such an issue when it launched its war on terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks or undertook the more costly invasion of Iraq in 2003.

America in 1917 did not fight on a credit card. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, with Congress's support, raised taxes and sold Liberty Bonds to cover costs. Bush, by contrast, had just lowered taxes and underestimated the costs of his military efforts. Borrowing to pay for the war helped lead to the current fiscal crisis.

Pincus takes us back through the political battles of 1917, to the U.S. declaration of war agains Germany on Apr. 6, 1917, after which President Wilson "quickly sought help from Congress to raise the war funds.

Sen. Furnifold Simmons (D-N.C.) argued, "It has been the custom of this country to pay war bills by bond issues, and I see no reason for a change in that policy."

Financier J.P. Morgan said up to 20 percent should come from taxes. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo thought raising taxes for half was best, while some members of Congress said taxes the first year should provide 75 percent of war costs.

Within 18 days, we learn, "Congress unanimously passed the largest bond bill in U.S. history," authorizing the sale of $5.5 billion. In May $2 billion worth were put on sale, and "5 million people offered to buy $3 billion worth."

In another five months Congress passed the War Revenue Act, "which was designed to raise $2.5 billion annually.

As the Treasury Department noted in a report, "This amount was believed by Congress to be as large as could be levied reasonably and fairly at this time. Every effort was made to distribute the burden of taxation where it could most easily be borne without hardship to the individual or injury to the productive power of the nation."

More than $1 billion was to come from an excess-profits tax on corporations, individuals and partnerships whose profits "have been increased enormously by war business, or business incident to the war," Treasury said.

Rates were also raised on corporations and the wealthy, personal exemptions for married and single taxpayers were reduced slightly and excise taxes were raised on liquor and tobacco products. Everyone paid something to support the war.

Did you get that? "

* Every effort was made to distribute the burden of taxation where it could most easily be borne."

* There was to be "an excess-profits tax on corporations, individuals and partnerships whose profits 'have been increased enormously by war business, or business incident to the war.'"

* "Rates were also raised on corporations and the wealthy, personal exemptions for married and single taxpayers were reduced slightly and excise taxes were raised on liquor and tobacco products. Everyone paid something to support the war."
The debt limit came into being later in 1917, as Congress was authorizing the second sale of Liberty Bonds, as part of a way of "giv[ing] Treasury a better way to manage raising funds."

The limit was set above the debt so the government was free to raise funds when needed. For example, in 1919 the debt limit was set at $43 billion when the debt was $25.5 billion.

Pincus then takes us through the intertwined history of the raising of the debt limit and the need to pay for, first, World War II, then Vietnam (not Korea -- "that conflict was mostly financed by increased taxes"), and even the first Iraq war, which the first President Bush paid for with a combination of spending cuts and, violating his sacred "no new taxes" oath," tax increases.

Then came Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Already wars of choice had been massively facilitated by the elmination of the draft. The troika knew they wouldn't be caught drafting America's youth wholesale into their crack-brained foreign adventures. And another crucial lesson learned from Vietnam: Americans wouldn't be watching their children flown home in body bags. Bad for morale, that.

There still remained the matter of paying for the Bush regime's planned orgy of bully-boy bravado. For one thing, we know, the clever idea arose of keeping as much as possible of the actual expenditures out of, or invisible in, the budget. But of course the bills still had to be managed somehow.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represented the first time that a U.S. president did not seek new taxes to cover the fighting. Supported by a GOP-led House and Senate from 2001 through 2006, and then just the GOP-run House, Bush raised the debt ceiling seven times through 2008, almost doubling it, from about $6 trillion to $11.3 trillion.

President Obama followed suit. In November 2009, Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.) and others introduced a bill for a surtax to help pay for the war. They had no support from leaders of either party or Obama.

The fiscal cliff is just weeks away, and the debt limit will come up probably next month.

I know Obama talked a lot about at least getting Iraq and Afghanistan expenditures into the legit federal budget, so we would at least know where the money is going. How much of that he did, I don't know. And while he hasn't broken the Bush regime dependency on raising the debt limit, the financial catastrophe he inherited hasn't given him much financing flexibility, short of drastically reducing the outflow of U.S. expenditures on those wars, not to mention DoD preparations for even more wasteful wars to come. All of this would have taken either more political courage or more political will than this president has.

Walter Pincus has one remaining question.

The fiscal cliff is just weeks away, and the debt limit will come up probably next month.

Where are leaders like those in 1917? Where are the American people who willingly shared new tax burdens, at least to pay for their forces fighting overseas?

By which I don't think he means people who do no more than mindless shout, "Support the troops."

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Reason no. 1827 why it's a bad idea to go to war behind leaders whose first interest is compensating for their tiny penises

Iraqi interpreter Ali Kanaan suffered hearing loss and burns to more than a third of this body as a result of a 2006 bombing while he was working as an interpreter for the U.S. military. He says he was pressured into taking an insurance settlement he did not think was adequate. [L.A. Times caption]

by Ken

It's hard to believe that stupidity and deceit practiced at this level don't rise to the level of a crime.

I know we've said it, and said it, and said it. But we are paying a horrendous price for pretending that it's okay to allow the crimes and malfeasances of the Bush regime go unaccounted for. President Obama's nice-sounding rhetoric about wanting "to look ahead" is, I"m sorry to have to say, nonsense. Allowing past blunders to go unexamined -- and, yes, unpunished where that applies -- all but guarantees that those same blunders will be repeated, and compounded.

The indications are that not only are we going to continue paying, but the price is going to continue going up. I think most Americans still have little idea the extent to which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were planned by ideologically blinded dimwits, liars, and wholly unaccountable thugs.

I think people have some idea that there were some crossed wires in the planning for the Iraq war. If you read the first couple of Bob Woodward "privileged insider" in (a politer way of saying designated propagandist for) the Bush regime, you can see then-Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld terrorizing his nonpolitical subordinates in the Pentagon (the political people, of course, understood that they were involved in planning a political, not a military, undertaking) to produce a war plan that matched what Chimpy the Prez and especially "Big Dick" Cheney were insisting on: something lean and quick involving a bare minimum of troops -- especially relative to what seasoned military commanders thought necessary.

Of course their "war on the cheap" came close to bankrupting us, or maybe did bankrupt us, because nobody involved in the process of planning the invasion seems to have felt responsible for figuring out how to pay for it. Possibly they believed some of the rhetoric we heard about Iraqi oil revenues paying for the whole fine adventure. Ha ha! Or maybe they just understood all they had to do was keep the expense out of the regular budget, and Congress could be counted on to keep passing "supplemental" appropriations, and never mind how those would be paid for.

This was all quite monstrous, but the real monstrosity was the failure to think through the real-world contingencies, starting with the question that you or I would probably have thought the second most basic, right have the question of how we would manage the invasion: What do we do afterward? The degree to which the Rumsfeld brain trust was unprepared in every way for every single thing that happened is staggering.

I'll assume that DWT are familiar with the basic outlines of that catastrophic failure, and are aware that in fact in the State Department they actualy were trying to plan for what would happen after the invasion. And we're also aware of just how far Cheney and Rumsfeld to keep the State Department entirely out of the planning and execution, sneering at those sissies' pussyfooting and thumb-sucking. The great innovation of fighting a war with mercenaries called "contractors" was all DoD, and all the ways in which that was completely out of control, literally so in the matter of policing the behavior of the contract employees -- that's all the handiwork of Rumsfled's geniuses' innovation of fighting a "secret" war. . And of course it kept costing us extra billions of dollars we didn't have.

What's new, at least to me, is the continuing unveiling of yet more ways in which the Cheney-Rumsfeld war plan ignored considerations you would have thought basic. My attention was directed to the third part of series by a team of Los Angeles Times reporters ("Injured war zone contractors fight to get care" -- following "Foreign interpreters hurt in battle find U.S. insurance benefits wanting" and "Foreign workes for U.S. are casualties twice over") and the story is in almost equal measures shocking and nauseating.

It concerns the contractors, but not the glamorous ones like the Blackwell and KBR ones, and this last installment concerns interpreters in particular. Maybe it's not all that surprising that Rumsfeld's Robots never stopped to think that our forces in Iraq would need to be able to communicate with the locals, especially once the adventure switched from invasion to occupation. Americans generally have a habit of forgetting that not everybody in the world speaks American, and for some reason our defense establishment seems especially resistant to this fact of life, as witness the glee with which it has expunged most of our linguistically qualified military personnel under DADT. "It's only them gays that speak furrin languages," I can hear the generals saying.

Eventually, of course, something had to be done, and the Pentagon went the contractor route. But the contractors who are the subject of the LAT reports weren't the regime-favored soldiers of fortune who were paid enormous salaries and benefits and excused from what appears to be any kind of oversight. No, these people, and the interpreters in particular, were not well paid, were treated even worse, lied to repeatedly while they were being killed an maimed in our service, and then left pretty much to fend for themselves. We have simply walked away from our obligation to those people.

The detail is horrifying and stomach-turning, so I'll refer you to the Times for that. But for the overall picture, here's just the start of T. Christian's Miller's Part 3.

FORGOTTEN WARRIORS

Foreign interpreters hurt in battle find U.S. insurance benefits wanting

For Iraqis and Afghans killed or injured while working for the U.S. military, benefits have often fallen far short of what was promised to them and their families.

By T. Christian Miller
December 18, 2009

After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military discovered that rebuilding the country and confronting an insurgency required a weapon not in its arsenal: thousands of interpreters.



To fill the gap, the Pentagon turned to Titan Corp., a San Diego defense contractor, which eventually hired more than 8,000 interpreters, most of them Iraqis.



For $12,000 a year, these civilians served as the voice of America's military, braving sniper fire and roadside bombs. Insurgents targeted them for torture and assassination. Many received military honors for their heroism.



At least 360 interpreters employed by Titan or its successor company were killed between March 2003 and March 2008, and more than 1,200 were injured. The death toll was far greater than that suffered by the armed forces of any country in the American-led coalition other than the United States. Scores of interpreters assisting U.S. forces in Afghanistan also have been killed or wounded.



An insurance program funded by American taxpayers was supposed to provide a safety net for interpreters and their families in the event of injury or death. Yet for many, the benefits have fallen painfully short of what was promised, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica found.



Interviews, corporate documents and data on insurance claims show that:



* Insurers have delayed or denied claims for disability payments and death benefits, citing a lack of police reports or other documentary evidence that interpreters' injuries or deaths were related to their work for the military. Critics, including some U.S. Army officers, say it is absurd to expect Iraqis and Afghans to be able to document the cause of injuries suffered in a war zone.



* Iraqi interpreters taken to neighboring Jordan for medical treatment say they were pressured to accept lump-sum settlements from insurers, rather than a stream of lifetime benefits potentially worth more, and were told that if they didn't sign, they would be sent back home -- a potential death sentence for Iraqis associated with the American war effort.



* Interpreters who have immigrated to the United States as refugees have ended up penniless, on food stamps or in menial jobs because their benefits under the U.S. insurance program are based on wages and living costs in their home countries. Payments intended to provide a decent standard of living in Iraq or Afghanistan leave the recipients below the poverty level in this country.

Now Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are apparently all off the hook. It's not their problem. Somehow, even though it wouldn't directly help the victims, these disclosures would feel more palatable if Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld and a bunch of their co-conspirators were languishing in dungeons. It would at least be a statement of acceptance of moral responsibility, a necessary prelude to accepting legal responsibility.

You feel bad for President Obama, with all the problems he has inherited from the Bush regimistas. But it's truly his problem now., and by now he's lost the window of opportunity for blaming it all on the Bushfolk.

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This really smart professor suggests something we can do about the Bush regime's war crimes

"Absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment -- our own federal government -- the healing cannot begin."

-- David Cole, in "What to Do About the Torturers?"
in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books

by Ken

It's a relief to find that some really smart people are worrying about some of the same stuff I am. On Friday, you'll recall, I asked, "Is there anything we can do about the criminals Chimpy the Prez and 'Big Dick' Cheney?" Note that I was referring to the full range of crimes committed by the Bush regime, the domestic ones (notably the plundering of the Justice Dept.) as well as the international ones (including what surely need to be treated as war crimes). Since then I've had a chance to look at the above-cited review-essay by David Cole, a Georgetown law professor (and, as he notes in a footnote, a member of the board of the Center for Constitutional Law).

Among the books considered, by the way, is the painstaking investigation of the story of torture at Guantanamo by the amazing British legal scholar-activist Philippe Sands, who made such an impression with his House Judiciary Committee testimony and TV appearance with Bill Moyers last May. Another of the books is The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book by Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights. (This is where Professor Cole has occasion to note his connection to the Center, adding that "I did not take part in the efforts to have criminal proceedings initiated against Rumsfeld.")

Cole isn't optimistic about real war-crimes trials against the Bush regimistas, legally warranted though they may be. For one thing, they took pains to insulate themselves from any such possibility by "grant[ing] retrospective immunity to officials involved in the interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in the wake of September 11" in the Military Commissions Act. For another, "The Justice Department's 'torture memo' would be a legal defense for any but the lawyers who wrote it."

And while it's technically possible for our suspected war criminals to be indicted and tried by tribunals abroad, Cole doesn't see that happening either: "As a matter of realpolitik, it is difficult to imagine any nation greeting the Obama administration with an international prosecution of former high-level US officials."

Still, Cole insists (bless him!), "Even if criminal prosecution seems unlikely, the acts of the past administration demand accountability." (The boldface is my embellishment.) He goes on to quote a statement from several months ago by Attorney General-designate Eric Holder:

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.... We owe the American people a reckoning.

Yes, Mr. Attorney General!

Cole argues, "Without prosecutions or an independent investigation, significant progress toward repudiating the administration's approval of cruelty and torture has already been made." He cites the Supreme Court's 2006 rejection of "President Bush's position that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the conflict with al-Qaeda"; the military's return to the no-torture policy set out in the Army Field Manual; reports of the CIA's abandoning waterboarding; and positions taken by various other government officials against the use of torture.

However, he understands that this still isn't enough:

The United States has never taken full responsibility for the crimes its high-level officials committed and authorized. That is unacceptable. In the long run, the best insurance against cruelty and torture becoming US policy again is a formal recognition that what we did after September 11 was wrong -- as a normative, moral, and legal matter, not just as a tactical issue. Such an acknowledgment need not take the form of a criminal prosecution; but it must take some official form.

"We have been willing to admit wrongdoing in the past," he says, citing the official apology signed by President Reagan in 1988 for the Japanese wartime internments, including payment of reparations. "That legislation, a formal repudiation of our past acts, provides an important cultural bulwark against something similar happening again."

And he concludes:

We cannot move forward in reforming the law effectively unless we are willing to account for what we did wrong in the past. The next administration or the next Congress should at a minimum appoint an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies. If it is to be effective, it must have subpoena power, sufficient funding, security clearances, access to all the relevant evidence, and, most importantly, a charge to assess responsibility, not just to look forward. We may know many of the facts already, but absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment -- our own federal government -- the healing cannot begin.

Thanks, professor! That's something.

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RUMSFELD... STILL HERE, STILL... BONKERS

Mags is back on the case. And she filed her first DWT report in months this morning:

The Washington Times and Time report that Rumsfeld will create a Foundation to teach about U.S. Engagement in World Affairs.

[Satire begins here]

Earlier today this reporter asked Rumsfeld how he would teach his pupils to engage the rest of the world.

Reporter: "Mr. Rumsfeld, what are the primary accomplishments you feel qualifies you to create such a foundation?"

Rumsfeld: "I suggest that folks head over to Think Progress where they have outlined a few of my main achievements in the war. You see the brilliance with which I executed the war... pun intended... heh heh... will not be recognized for decades. That is, unless I create this foundation. Gotta catapult the propaganda... urrrr, no that was George's line. But, well you know what I mean. It takes a good deal of time to prove a negative, but we are damn well gonna try."

Reporter: "Rummy, may I call you Rummy?"

Rummy: "No, of course not!!!!"

Reporter: "Ok then, Mr. Secretary, what would you say are the best tactics to begin negotiations and to establish the proper relationships when you are dealing with other leaders in the world?"

Rumsfeld: "Well, first you grab their nipples and give them a tweak.....like this."



Then, while they are distracted by that tactic, you reach up and grab them by the balls......Like this



...and, give them a good yank. That will get just about anyone's attention."

Reporter: "Thank you Mr. Secretary."

-Mags