Iraq + 10 Years: The celebration continues!

By the time the American troops appeared in the center of Baghdad, on April 9th, everyone I knew had lost a relative in one or another of the bombings or the lethal street crossfires of the previous twenty-fours hours. For all their "smartness," enough bombs had gone awry or missed their targets to kill many hundreds of civilians. Still, among the Iraqis I knew, their mourning families attributed their losses to the fate of God while expressing their satisfaction that the Americans, after so long, had come to rescue them. They waited to be told what to do. No instructions ever came.

Instead, as the Americans allowed the city, including its armories, to be looted -- in many cases by members of the ancien régime -- while issuing fiats that disbanded the old army and banned the Baath Party, my Iraqi friends became first bewildered and then fearful. Within weeks, the "defeated" regime, with jihadist allies, had begun fighting back, of course, and the real Iraq war began. Almost every single Iraqi I knew then has had to flee the country and today lives in exile: in Sweden, in Cyprus, in the U.K., in the U.S., and many other countries.

-- The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson,
from "How We Forgot Iraq"

by Ken

I realized that I should have plunked the above David Sipress cartoon from this week's New Yorker into my post last night, "Were the CIA and MI6 told that Iraq had no WMDs? Tony Blair's 'too busy' to comment -- how 'bout George and Big Dick?" Luckily, though, we're only just beginning the festivities to remember our great triumph in Iraq. Or to not remember, as it were. Here's more of Jon Lee Anderson's newyorker.com post (here's the link again):

. . . Iraq has become the Great American Unmentionable, the fiasco that was.

Iraq has dropped from America's national discourse like a hot stone since the last U.S. combat troops were extracted. Its disappearing act rivals that of the man who launched the war, George W. Bush. Almost no one has said a thing, apart from notes on the anniversary, since [President Barack] Obama's chapter-closing speech, which dutifully highlighted America's achievements there. In the most surreal part of it, sounding for all the world like the C.E.O. of DHL, Obama described as a laudable achievement how "thousands of tons of equipment have been packed up and shipped out."

Notwithstanding the belated success of General Petraeus's 2007 troop surge and the concurrent Sunni Awakening, which permitted us to carry out our troop withdrawal with a modicum of decency, the Iraq war represents a geostrategic catastrophe of colossal proportions for the U.S., not to mention a humanitarian catastrophe for Iraqis. It remains a severely damaged country. Iraq today is effectively a Finlandized state, under the influence of a vituperatively anti-Western Iran

In keeping with national custom -- remember Vietnam? -- we calculate only the number of Americans who were killed in Iraq; their four thousand four hundred and eighty-six deaths have been carefully tabulated. As for the Iraqis, no one knows how many died. During the war itself, famously, the Pentagon declared that it didn't keep casualty figures for Iraqis, and there it remains. There have been wildly fluctuating estimates, but it would seem likely that, at a minimum, some hundred and twenty-five thousand Iraqis died as a result of our invasion -- and, it should be said, continue to do so today. But the only Hollywood movie that consecrates our Iraq experience, and that significant numbers of Americans went to see, "The Hurt Locker," is a self-referential film about our pain, not theirs. There are, meanwhile, popular video games, like Call of Duty and Full Spectrum Warrior, in which millions of us constantly return to Iraq, virtually, and win battles we actually lost, or never really waged.

The new normal in Iraq is a country where oil is pumped and nightlife has returned to parts of Baghdad, but where suicide bombs also go off, here and there, every few days, with the regularity of tornados touching down in Oklahoma. As if to drive that point home, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia -- the terrorist force that our ill-conceived invasion unleashed from Iraq's chest of horrors -- came out yesterday, on the anniversary of the initiation of hostilities, and set off bombs that killed at least fifty-seven people. As we celebrate -- what, no longer being there? -- let's spare a moment for Iraq, and the Iraqis.

[I should note that I've regretfully skipped over Anderson's opening paragraphs, with his on-the-ground recollection of Baghdad in the immediate Shock and Awe period. You really should check it out for yourself. -- Ed.]

(Just one question, Jon. This alleged "George W. Bush" of whom you speak. The name isn't ringing any bells. Can you supply any biographical particulars? I gather he was once somewhat well-known?)

LEST WE REMEMBER

Now if you're no-memory skills haven't been quite up to forgetting that whole, um, business in Iraq, you're not alone. Consider, for example, the large chorus of budget-deficit hawks who have worked so hard to make the need to slash so-called entitlement programs the centerpiece of their blunt insistence that the national debt is an American shame and a sin against future generations of Americans. How many of them have included in their white papers and sermons an accounting of how much of that debt is owing to our recent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan? By my calculations, the answer is approximately zero.

Dontcha love that Dickie Perle?

However, in case you're still having difficulty forgetting Iraq (or is it Iran? is there a difference?), our Washington Post "In the Loop" pal Al Kamen is on hand to honor his "Quote of the Week" -- and a runner-up.

The 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion reignited the bitter debate over the war. And once again it brought some great quotes from the war’s staunchest defenders.

But the quote of the week goes to Richard Perle, who was on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and a vociferous backer of the war.

Wednesday, Perle had the perfect answer to the inevitable question, posed by National Public Radio’s Renee Montagne.

"When you think about this, was it worth it?" she asked.

"I’ve got to say," Perle responded, "I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say, well, we shouldn’t have done that."

So critics should start being reasonable.

Then there's "Wolfman Paulie" Wolfowitz

Yes, the Wolfman, the onetime deputy secretary of defense, is responsible for Al's first runner-up quote, delivered in a Fox News column. Take it, Al!

The problem, it turns out, was really just a matter of strategy, Wolfowitz wrote. But it took four years to develop the right strategy, Wolfowitz said, noting "how different things might have been if the U.S. had been pursuing a counter-insurgency strategy from the outset."

Which brings us back to our David Sipress cartoon. This "we're right and they're wrong" ethos isn't, as one might at first think, a mere propaganda line designed to hornswoggle the unwashed masses. Simpletons of this stripe can be found in the highest reaches of government. So it may be that Wolfman Paulie isn't such a champion at forgetting. You don't have to forget what you never knew. For the record, Al Kamen points out:

[I]t’s not that the problems weren’t evident almost immediately, judging from an article by our colleagues Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest only a month after the invasion.

The headline? "U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites." The report found that "U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

Just a week into the war, the Army’s senior ground commander in Iraq was saying, "The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against."

AN ADMINISTRATIONFUL OF LYING LIARS

Wolfman Paulie makes a splashy appearance in a "Fine Print" column by WaPo's venerable sage Walter Pincus, "Iraq's lessons are there for the heeding." In fact, he's the lead player:

"Fundamentally, we have no idea what is needed unless and until we get there on the ground."

That was then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz three weeks before the Iraq war began a decade ago. He was digressing from his script on what he thought would be positive results from a military action while appearing before the House Budget Committee on Feb. 27, 2003.

None of Wolfie's questioners seem to have paid much attention to this, since the people selling the need for war in Iraq were assumed to have all these on-the-ground matters under control. Especially not when he was dishing out zingers like this:

Disarming Iraq and fighting the war on terror are not merely related. Disarming Iraq's arsenal of terror is a crucial part of winning the war on terror.

Of course this was based on the nonsensical lie that Saddam Hussein was the architect of 9/11, which even at the time was known to be utter nonsense by everyone who wasn't under the spell of the lying liars of the Bush regime.

It turns out that Wolfie wasn't being absolutely straightforward with the House budgeteers. Walter P rehashes a rasher of rationales thrown out by assorted boosters of an Iraq invasion, and Wolfie seems to have been aware of this too.

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz said more than a year later about the justification for the war, according to a Pentagon transcript of an interview he gave to Vanity Fair.

It's apparently just a minor detail that "the one issue that everyone could agree on" was a lie.

It's hard to know whether Wolfie was lying or just kidding when, as Walter P recalls, he told the Defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, on March 27, 2003, a week after the invasion began:

There is a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.

"He certainly was wrong about that," Walter P notes, and adds:

The fact is neither Wolfowitz nor Bush nor other senior policymakers knew much about Iraq's culture and domestic politics. The result was that they totally underestimated the task being undertaken, which meant the loss of 4,400 U.S. service personnel and 32,000 wounded.

The fact is neither Wolfowitz nor Bush nor other senior policymakers knew much about Iraq's culture and domestic politics. The result was that they totally underestimated the task being undertaken, which meant the loss of 4,400 U.S. service personnel and 32,000 wounded.

And he goes on to note, returning to a theme we heard him talking about in December ("Walter Pincus wonders how Americans lost the will to pay for our wars"):

What many forget is that Iraq and Afghanistan also mark the first U.S. wars in which a president, first Bush and now President Obama, has not sought a war tax. The result: nearly $2 trillion in war expenditures put on the nation's credit card.

Have those pushing for military action against Iran, North Korea or involvement in Syria mentioned asking taxpayers to support paying for such operations?

Again, will the deficit hawks currently having riding high in full bamboozlement of the hapless infotainment noozers be chiming in on this debate? (Ha ha, like there's going to be a debate. Sure!)

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The R's make history by filibustering the Hagel nomination

"This isn’t high school, getting ready for a football game or some play that's being produced at high school. This is -- we're trying to confirm somebody to run the defense of our country, the military of our country." (Watch video of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today on the Senate floor here.)

by Ken

So they've gone and done it, the Senate R's have: This afternoon, for the first time in history, though they don't like using the word (see below), they filibustered the nomination of a "national security" cabinet position. And they couldn't be prouder. Because these diseased jungle animals were able to prevent the Senate leadership from getting the crucial 60th vote it needed to end debate ("Senate Republicans block vote on Hagel nomination").

Maybe Harry Reid wishes now that he had pushed for a rules change that would have at least required filibusterers to actually, you know, filibuster -- so that the country could at least see them doing their dirtywork. Do you suppose it's just a coincidence that the totally off-off-the-rails Senate R's decided just now that it was safe to proceed with their precedent-shattering shenanigan?

Even now these demented revolutionaries lie their stinking carcasses out. As Rachel Weiner pointed out this evening on WaPo's "The Fix" blo, "They still don't want to call it a filibuster."

"This is not a filibuster," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) announced on the floor immediately after the vote. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) concurred, saying Republicans weren't trying to block the vote, just asking for more time. "If this is not a filibuster, I'd like to see what a filibuster is," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) retorted. On Wednesday, we explained why Republicans don't consider their block of Hagel's nomination a filibuster.

Republicans don't want to filibuster Chuck Hagel's nomination to be the next Secretary of Defense. They just want to require a 60-vote threshold to end debate on his confirmation on the floor of the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has filed for cloture, saying it's a "shame" that he had to do so.

"We're going to require a 60-vote threshold," Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) told Foreign Policy. But, he added, "It's not a filibuster. I don't want to use that word." Likewise, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) says he now might vote against cloture, which cuts off debate. But he still thinks "a filibuster is a bad precedent" to set for a Cabinet nominee. No Cabinet nominee has been defeated by filibuster; the vast majority receive only an up-or-down vote.

No, that sack of filth Jim Inhofe, a man without a sane cell in his brain, doesn't want to use that word. Why should anyone give a damn what words Crazy Jim does or doesn't want to use? Well, you can read for yourself the tortured word play by which these lying scumbags try to pretend they aren't doing what they've so gleefully done. As I keep pointing out, when you're dealing with right-wingers, it's insane to make any assumption except that every word out of their mouths is a lie.

SO WHAT'S IN IT FOR THE R'S?

This morning WaPo "Fix"-master Chris Cillizza was exploring the question "Why Republicans are filibustering Chuck Hagel," and allowing for the shilly-shallying you know is going to creep in a Village stooge talks to self-important pols, the answer turns tout to be what one might have expected: because it makes them feel like big shots, and because they can. Here's the fancier version:

1. There's no downside. While the fight over Hagel is consuming official Washington -- and enraging the Democratic base -- Republican strategists believe that not only are few regular people following all of this, but the former Nebraska senator isn't someone with all that many allies outside of Washington. "He's about as unsympathetic a character as you're ever going to see so the political danger is virtually non-existent," said one senior Senate Republican aide. Added another GOP Senate strategist: "Hagel doesn't have a natural base of grassroots support outside the president and Democratic leaders so it's difficult to see any real backlash developing." Worth noting: A Quinnipiac University poll conducted earlier this month showed that two-thirds of people didn't know enough about Hagel to offer an opinion either favorable or unfavorable.

2. The beefs with Hagel are legit. Several operatives rejected the notion that the Hagel blockade is largely about politics. (Worth noting: ALL fights in Congress are at least 50 percent about politics and often far more than that.) "A number of senators have serious concerns with his lack of experience leading such a massive bureaucracy, in addition to his position on Iran and Israel," said one GOP strategist. "And in some ways, this is part of a broader debate and effort to draw attention to the administration's policies in the Middle East.  The longer this nomination is drawn out, the more attention is given to those issues."

3. It's a Republican rallying cry. Republicans thought they would be in the Senate majority right now. And they thought they might also have Mitt Romney in the White House. Neither of those things happened. Instead, Senate Republicans watched their House colleagues ensure they got a worse deal on the fiscal cliff and kick the can down the road on the debt ceiling.  In short: The Senate GOP conference needs something to rally around and Hagel's nomination serves as a useful exercise to do just that. (Also, never forget that Hagel is widely viewed as a wolf in sheep's clothing -- a Republican turned kind-of Democrat -- by most of his former colleagues.) "It's always good to have a ‘support your colleagues' exercise when a Senator in your conference is looking for information from the Administration early in a new Congress," explained one aide. "It ensures you're playing as a team going forward.  It sets a precedent that the conference will not be rolled."

There's no price to pay. Those, it seems to me, are the crucial words.

If I were advising the president, I would be flooding every media outlet in the country with angry denunciations of the treacherous Republicans who hate America so much that to promote their demented ideology and unchecked egos they prefer to have the Pentagon removed from effective control. I would be crusading to make sure that any American who contemplates voting for a Republican knows he/she would be voting for a traitor who wants to see the country destroyed.

Which of course puts the lie to point (2), about Hagel's administrative inexperience -- even though there is a point to be made here. The Post's Walter Pincus made the case the other day ("An image issue for Chuck Hagel"), arguing that his testimony January 31 before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he "appeared to be unprepared and open to bullying," may have fatally weakened him in the eyes of the people he would have to lead as defense secretary. Among senators, Pincus said, "Enough of his former colleagues will accept the idea that he didn't want to be confrontational or that he was having a bad day."

The people Hagel must worry about are the men and women of the Defense Department for whom the hearing was a first look at their next boss in action. It wasn't a promising start.

If there is one characteristic that marks the military it is preparation -- careful planning, covering all contingencies, firmness, clear questions and answers, personal discipline.

Being prepared is a military habit practiced for that moment when lives may depend on it. It's a quality expected in its leaders.

He cited the case of his friend Les Aspin, who was chair of the House Armed Services Committee when Bill Clinton tapped him to be defense secretary.

Aspin was extremely bright and a good politician. But he was casual, if not sloppy, not just in dress but in his habits. He lacked discipline. Meetings with him could start late and go on forever. He loved to explore every relevant aspect of an issue, and even those that weren't relevant.

As one of Aspin's long-term friends, I was among those who warned him that he had to shape up if he took the Pentagon job. His every step would be weighed by the military, from the Joint Chiefs on down the chain of command.

I was sitting in the stands at Fort Myer during Aspin's welcoming ceremony in 1993. I will never forget the murmurs among the officers and enlisted men around me when Aspin, slouching and out of step, reviewed the troops.

Almost immediately he faced complicated issues, but Aspin's easy-going style never gained much respect within "the building" -- the Pentagon. Criticized for Somalia decisions and troubled by a heart problem, he resigned in early 1994.

But I don't think the R's who complained to Chris Cillizza about Hagel's "lack of experience leading such a massive bureaucracy" had in mind the ease with which they had bullied and beaten him at his committee hearing. Here's Walter Pincus again:

The irony about Hagel's hearing performance is that it hid his feisty personality and left the impression he could be pushed around. More than a half-dozen times he apologized for making perfectly acceptable statements, sometimes not bothering to correct senators who took those statements out of context.

Pincus compared Hagel's performance with John Brennan's subsequent appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

The nominee to head the CIA clearly had that agency's staff in mind Thursday as he sat before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Several times he corrected or challenged senators. He told Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) he disagreed "vehemently" with the conclusion that Brennan had leaked classified information in 2012. With Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), Brennan questioned the accuracy of a news story that was the basis for Coats's questions.

In the end, the administration and the Senate majority leadership will probably do what they have to do to get the Hagel nomination to an up-or-down vote and he'll be confirmed -- as an even weaker defense secretary than Walter Pincus was fearing. And the mad-dog Senate R's will have shown once again that the Just Say No-niks are even more firmly in charge than they were in the president's first term.


UPDATE: YOUNG JOHNNY McCRANKY'S AGAINST
HAGEL 'CAUSE HE WAS MEAN TO CHIMPY THE PREZ

I was so wrapped up with trying to get this post done amidst a welter of other obligations that I didn't notice Howie's pass-along of a delicious ThinkProgress Security post by Hayes Brown in which Hayes quotes that crack security expert and man of principle Young Johnny McCranky on the tube this afternoon with another intellectual giant, Fox Noisemaker Neil Cavuto:

To be honest with you, Neil, it goes back to there's a lot of ill will towards Senator Hagel because when he was a Republican, he attacked President Bush mercilessly and say he was the worst President since Herbert Hoover and said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War, which was nonsense. He was anti-his own party and people -- people don't forget that. You can disagree but if you're disagreeable, then people don't forget that.

That's right, you heard it from the dripping maw of the Crankyman himself: "If you're disagreeable, then people don't forget that." Honestly, folks, you can't make this stuff up.

If these people were Gong Show contestants, we'd be well rid of them all by now.

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Sure, $5.7B is a stiff price to pay to get out of Afganistan -- but consider the alternative

"The size of the withdrawal is mind-boggling. But with the 'fiscal cliff' approaching fast, it's worth taking a moment to realize that the costly Afghan operation is going on a credit card, along with the $1 trillion or more spent in Iraq."

-- Washington Post "Fine Print" columnist Walter Pincus,
in "The high cost of disengagement"

by Ken

Just two or three weeks ago I wrote ("Walter Pincus wonders how Americans lost the will to pay for our wars") about this astonishing break with previous American practice, by which the Bush regime broke with all precedent by "paying" for its pernicious adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan by running a tab -- a practice candidate Barack Obama roundly deplored but once in office was either unable or unwilling to change.

It has never been easy to pay for wars, but until now successive U.S. governments took it that there was no way around it. Of course there still isn't. Eventually the bills have to be paid. But when you use the sleight of hand of essentially putting it all on credit cards, you may be able to avoid embarrassing public discussion of the size and monstrousness of these expenditures.

Now Walter Pincus, following the mandate of his "Fine Print" column, has taken a close look at a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that says "it's going to cost an additional $5.7 billion over the next year or two just to transfer or return most of the troops and equipment we shipped into that country." That's on top of the "nearly $600 billion [spent] over the past 10 years putting combat forces into Afganistan."

"The size of the withdrawal is mind-boggling," says Walter. "But with the 'fiscal cliff' approaching fast, it's worth taking a moment to realize that the costly Afghan operation is going on a credit card, along with the $1 trillion or more spent in Iraq." And he reminds us: "Iraq and Afghanistan are the first U.S. wars in which the American public was not asked to pay a cent in additional taxes."

For those who are curious, Walter provides a detailed sketch of how this withdrawal budget breaks down, and also explains some basic facts of life that explain why Afghanistan-withdrawal costs will be substantially higher even than Iraq-withdrawal costs were. Considering how difficult (and how expensive) it has been to get personnel and equipment into land-locked and barely accessible Afghanistan, it will be at least as difficult (and as expensive) to get them out -- unlike Iraq, where we had easy road access to safe seaports for relatively easy and cheap maritime transport. In both cases, however, even the sky-high costs of withdrawal were only possible thanks to long, detailed planning.

The Iraq drawdown showed the importance of early planning. Withdrawal plans began in 2008, three years before the December 2011 final departure of U.S. combat troops. In Afghanistan, the Marine Corps and Navy began withdrawal preparations in 2009, the Army in 2010.

An obvious question, I suppose, is whether we should be put off by the drawdown price tag. And the answer, it seems to me, is of course not! Does it make more sense to continue pouring those staggering piles of cash (or charge slips) down those ratholes?

At some point we really do have to have to face up to the implications (I'm restraining myself from using the word consequences) of disastrous policy choices. Otherwise we have an adjunct to the concept of "too big to fail": too expensive to pull the plug on.

The militarists -- and, come to think of it, advocates of generally doody-brained right-wing boondoggles -- like to play this as an "aha!" card. It was extraordinary enough that the subject of cuts in military expenditures even came up at the time they were written into the now-infamous sequester (and they probably wouldn't have found their way in if anyone believed at the time that the sequester might actually happen) and right-wing ideologues suddenly warn of the economic consequences: Jobs will be lost!

Of course when it comes to making other kinds of spending cuts, cuts of programs that actual provide useful human services, the Righties never worry about that. Screw all those effing public-service workers! And never mind if our cities -- and our rural precincts too -- go to hell! It's wasteful government spending. But then, as we know, when it comes to truly wasteful government spending, notably the sacred boondoggles of "national security" profligacy, even the hardest of die-hard "fiscal conservatives" become blooming Keynesians. It's the phenomenon of "military Keynesianism." Perhaps "economic stimulus" becomes real to them -because so many of them are pocketing sizable chunks of the megabucks poured down those drains?

And did you notice how our beloved munitions industry, faced with sudden talk about even the possibility of tightening gun restrictions, started threatening to pull the plug on the economy of Connecticut, and by extension any other state that has sold its soul to the Devil of the armaments industry? As the old saying goes, lie down with dogs and you'll wake up with fleas.

We don't like to talk about it much, but one of the few things we still produce for which there's a robust world market is arms. How much suffering and death around the world takes place to satiate the greed of the arms merchants? The obvious consequence is that it's unlikely that there's any country less enthusiastic about arms reduction than ours -- with this lovely new wrinkle that we better shut up about it if we know what's good for us. Otherwise the arms makers will make us sorry.

Walter Pincus ends his new piece: "[I]t's worth paying attention to the monetary and human costs of getting into and out of military ventures so that perhaps the country will be better prepared next time." Which seems to me a serious understatement. A pair of pointless and doomed, indeed pernicious, military involvements of staggering dimenson were undertaken with essentially no concern for the cost. Of course if they had been evaluated simply in terms of desirability and feasibility of goals they would never have been undertaken in the first place. As our colleague Ian Welsh points out, "In policy terms, the kind thing to do is usually the right thing to do."

I know that this kind of thinking is regarded as "naive," as "pie in the sky." But if Ian's thinking had been applied seriously to the decisions to embrace the Iraq and Afghanistan boondoggles, having as their result not improving but compromising our national security, creating new, more determined and long-lived enemies, might we not have thought better? If any consideration had been given to the consequences of turning over such a large segment of our economy to the Merchants of Death, might we not have arrived at different thoughts about the kinds of subsidies we wished to apply, or not?

I sincerely hope that Walter is right, that if Americans scrutinize the costs of extricating ourselves from these holes we dig ourselves, we'll think better about it the next time the subject comes up. But I think that lesson might be learned better if we were getting occasional reports from the cells where "Big Dick" Cheney, "Chimpy the Prez" Bush, and Donnie Rumsfeld are serving their life-without-possibility-of-parole sentences.

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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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What is it in our culture that makes it so easy to forgive (at least some) people for being wrong, and so hard to forgive people for being right?

Leonard Downie Jr. (in foreground, with his predecessor, Ben Bradlee, at left) was nudged into retirement as executive editor of the Washington Post last summer with the arrival of new publisher Katharine Weymouth. Might it have helped if he'd been forced out several years earlier for the paper's breakdown in covering the run-up to the Iraq war?

by Ken

Howie and Noah and I have all been talking a lot lately about this maddening issue of accountability. Most recently it has come up in connection with the crimes of the Bush regimistas, including the war crimes of the Bush regimistas, which we are required by a host of international treaties to prosecute, even if we find it inconvenient to do so. Hard as it may be to believe, there really isn't an "inconvenience exemption" from our obligation to prosecute, for example, torture.

The argument we keep coming back to is that failure to punish the kind of law-breaking and Constitution-shredding in which the Bush regime not only regularly but systematically engaged pretty well guarantees that all the excesses will be repeated and in all likelihood expanded. Bet on it.

It's not as if nobody has noticed or written about this before. On the great issues of our time, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the housing bubble that on top of all the other chicanery and bogosity brought the economy to its knees, there were plenty of people who got the stories right in real time while the talking heads of industry and the media got them wrong, and the record shows that, overwhelmingly, the people who got the stories right not only weren't rewarded but were punished while the people who got the stories wrong not only weren't punished but were rewarded.

Now Jason Linkins is reporting on HuffPost about what appears to be an especially egregious instance. The Washington Post has promoted, as one of two managing editors, the assistant managing editor for national news who not only played a major role in the Post's blown coverage of the Bush regime's push to war in Iraq, and in particular the question of Iraq's posession of WMDs, but apparently thinks they did just fine.

Jason goes back to a surprisingly tough piece done in August 2004 by the Post's Howard Kurtz, himself one of the paper's most notorious butt-kissing, status-quo-worshiping hacks, reviewing its coverage, with extensive, heavily regretful quotes from the principals involved, from then-Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. on down. Most everyone accepts at least some blame, with one shining exception.

Liz Spayd, the assistant managing editor for national news, says The Post's overall record was strong.

"I believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone to question the administration's assertions on all kinds of subjects related to the war. . . . Do I wish we would have had more and pushed harder and deeper into questions of whether they possessed weapons of mass destruction? Absolutely," she said. "Do I feel we owe our readers an apology? I don't think so." [Note: The ellipsis is in Kurtz's published story.]

Jason points to published pieces in 2004 and 2005 by the Post's then-ombudsman, Michael Getler, which suggest that a lot of readers disagreed about whether they were owed an apology, and the ombudsman sympathized.

Spayd is also implicated in what Jason calls "the curious case of Walter Pincus." To most of us, Pincus is one of the legendary reporters of the last 30-40 years. And he's not one of the people who got the run-up to the Iraq war wrong. He was clearly a pain in Post editors' butt. As a long-time expert on nuclear weapons, he had all kinds of questions about the stories the Bush regime was feeding the public, but he had a tough time getting skeptical stories into the paper at all, let alone getting prominent placement for them.

The 2004 Kurtz story contains some remarkable back-biting at Pincus, mostly anonymous, which is itself interesting when you consider the kinds of mea culpas people were putting on the record. "[S]ome in the Post newsroom were questioning his work. Editors complained that he was 'cryptic,' as one put it, and that his hard-to-follow stories had to be heavily rewritten."

Two people go on the record, more or less, about the problems with Walter Pincus:

Spayd declined to discuss Pincus's writing but said that "stories on intelligence are always difficult to edit and parse and to ensure their accuracy and get into the paper."

Downie agreed that difficulties in editing Pincus may have been a factor in the prewar period, because he is "so well sourced" that his reporting often amounts to putting together "fragments" until the pieces were, in Downie's word, "storifyable."

Now I don't doubt that editorial elves were rewriting the dickens out of Pincus's stories, but I'm not persuaded it was because they were unreadable or because it was so hard to "ensure their accuracy." After all, Downie complained (complained?) that his stories were "so well sourced." And I'm not sure I could guess what "storifyable" means.

Jason has a theory about those unnamed newsroom sources:

If I'm playing the *POOF!* NOW I AM ON THE RECORD/*ZAP!* NOW I AM OFF THE RECORD game, I have to conclude that unnamed "editors" and "some in the Post newsroom" are really either Spayd or Downie, and, given the tenor of their responses, likely Spayd.

Anyway, the news, as you have surely guessed, is that Ms. Spayd is one of those new managing editors. She and Raju Narisetti, according to the paper's press release, "will share responsibility for The Post's award-winning journalism, whether in print, online and on mobile devices, and they will lead the integration of The Post's print and online newsrooms." Specifically, Ms. Spayd "will oversee the gathering, editing and production of news. Her brief will include political, general, business, foreign and metropolitan news, as well as The Post's news desk and the print newspaper's day-to-day production."

Jason quotes extensively from the lingering concern ombudsman Getler voiced in 2005 about the paper's failure to expose the Bush regime's misrepresentations. ("I cannot think of a story in the past 40 years that offers more warning signs for journalism and for the role of the press in our democracy.") He stressed the crucial role of editors in communicating to reporters that, with "very important stories out there" ("whether war or health care or budget deficits or other subjects that affect our lives and future"), "there is a determination and commitment to get to the bottom of them in a timely fashion." In the case of Iraq, he wrote,

[I]t seemed to me that editors didn't have their eye on, and didn't go for, the right ball at the right time. It's a lesson that ought to be etched in the culture here as deeply as Watergate.

Not long ago, I cited Paul Krugman's blog-post complaint about the pending appointment of CNN's Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general, recalling his factually erroneous on-air savaging of Michael Moore's Sicko.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

Maybe we're wrong about Liz Spayd. Maybe she has actually learned the journalistic lessons that were clearly escaping her in her 2004 look back. It sure looks, though, as if "socially acceptable" wrongness has once again been rewarded.

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