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NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, (MAY)JUNE 2006
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provinces and figure out if you can grow some figs, or find out
who your third cousin was who went to Jordan 30 years ago and
go live with them. I think the most under-reported trend in Iraq
over the last six months is in fact migration, both internal and
external. There is no incentive to continue being a doctor in Iraq,
and this is a country that desperately needs doctors. There is no
incentive to be a university professor or to work for oil companies
I understand when people in the Bush administration say
that it’s because the terrorists are winning, but it’s not just about
the terrorists, it’s about folks who didn’t like the 500 pound bomb
coming through the roof of their house in Fallujah and killing 12
innocent family members when the U.S. said it was on an anti­
terrorist offensive. That 16 year old who watched his family die
had no interest in growing up to be a terrorist but now he is,
labeled by us because of the life circumstances he experienced.
I think any one of us out there who witnessed a foreign govern­
ment coming in and killing innocent family members would turn
against them.
What we have been unwilling to distinguish from the
start of this conflict is the difference between the very small
number of al-Qaeda who are fighting us and the relatively
small number of Sunnis who are disenchanted and want to
bring somebody like Saddam back, versus the thousands and
thousands who have turned against us because we have moved
from the period of liberation the first three months to an army of
occupation. History tells us, that armies of occupation under all
conditions will have anywhere from 8 year olds to 80 years old
fighting against them, and that’s what we have in Iraq.
The estimates of what is being spent in Iraq by the
United States runs anywhere from $250 billion to almost $400
billion. Think what a Nobel Prize winning economist said just a
couple of months ago — the overall price tag by the time this is
done a couple of years from now will be over a trillion dollars,
and so the real costs are considerable. The interesting thing
about this war and the way it’s being financed is that it is
essentially being deficit financed, which means that you and
I don’t really feel this in our pocket book right now. If you’re on
tough times, you will recognize that some aspects of your social
programs may be cut. But it’s very difficult to draw a direct line
between the Bush administration’s decisions to cut back on
domestic, so-called entitlement programs and the war expend­
itures. That linkage is there, but it’s hard to directly trace.
I think my friends on the left part of the political spectrum
say that this is conservatism at its best: you get the ability to gut
social programs because you say we have our higher priority
needs for national security and you can run up deficits for the
war on terror and at the same time say we have to be fiscally
responsible on all these other programs even if the only ones
left have to do with health care, education, job development,
and the like. So the cost is really there, but we've never been
good at educating one another politically about the impact of
deficit spending. I think there are enough people around who
remember the dangers we came out of the Reagan/Bush
administration with, The Clinton people were of an economic
view that they could never generate growth in the United States
— never be able to put people back to work — unless they dealt
with the deficit, and they worked hard to reduce that deficit.
The next administration, Republican or Democrat, will
have to deal seriously with this deficit issue. There is only one of
two ways to do this, even if the spending remains steady about
Iraq: you’re either going to have to increase taxes or and/or
continue to cut social programs.
Think about a future debate at the Presidential level
where a Democrat says, “let's be honest about what’s going on
MIKE THOMPSON
here, we can’t keep giving tax breaks to the rich, we’ve got to
bring in that money, we’ve got to limit the costs to defense
because we've got so much money tied up in defense we’re
taking the money out of the mouths of schoolchildren.” And the
Democrat is going to be lambasted by a Republican who says,
’I’m not going to compromise the security of America if we have
another 9/11 and I’m not going to raise taxes. This is what these
Democrats always do, they tax and spend then tax and spend.”
So what has happened in terms of the cost of the war is
not only the real money, not only the delayed debt our children
and grandchildren will pay, but the Bush people have cleverly
defined the future of the debate and I think that’s something we
have to start taking back from them before these campaigns
even begin.
There has been a relative decline in media coverage of
the Iraq war over the last two years. It’s interesting to even listen
to National Public Radio and hear stories from Iraq that would be
the fourth, fifth or sixth story down the line, and only on a day
when there is large scale bombing do you get a report. I think
it’s very difficult for news agencies to get news; it’s too riskfy to
get past the Green Zone if the media has somebody there. If
they don’t have somebody there, they're dependent on the major
news services, but Reuters, BBC and CNN are pretty sporadic
with their coverage of a given day, and sometimes they talk
about what’s going on in the Saddam trial and don’t give you any
THE LONG WAR POSTURE
BY GREGORY D. FOSTER
The American public is being lulled into a false sense of
insecurity. And insecurity, construed or real, is what gives those
in power — our purported protectors — their self-righteous aura
of indispensability.
President bush; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld;
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace; the
head of the U.S. Central Command, General John P. Abizaid;
and the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review, among
other authorative purveyors of received wisdom, all warn us that
we’re embroiled in — and destined to be further subjected to —
what is to be known as a Long War.
It would be one thing if such semantic legerdemain
reflected revelatory strategic insight or a more sophisticated
appreciation of the intrinsic nature of postmodern conflicts and
enemies. But that is not the case. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the
cynical view that America’s senior military leaders are willfully
playing public relations handmaiden to their political overlords
at the expense of a naive, trusting citizenry.
Even as Long War rhetoric artfully circumvents such
politically discomfiting terminology as “insurgency," its underlying
message should be clear: We dutiful subjects should be quietly
patient and not expect too much (if anything) too soon (if at all)
from our rulers as they prosecute their unilaterally proclaimed
war without end against ubiquitous evil.
The intent of the message is to dull our senses, to
dampen our expectations, to thereby deaden the critical dissent­
ing forces of democracy that produce political turbulence and
impede autocratic license. Being warned here amounts to being
disarmed — intellectually and civically.
For the unsuspecting among us, this is what adopting
and institutionalizing a Long War posture really means:
- It will give permanency to the manufactured state of
collective fear and emergency that provides pretext for the
further imperialization of the Presidency.
-It will thereby extend the self-marginalization of a
cowardly Congress shamelessly willing to waive its constitutional
prerogatives rather than stand up to a self-anointed wartime
commander-in-chief.
- It will have a “cry w o lf effect by numbing the public,
which is tired of the permanent state of false emergency, to real
threats and emergencies when they arise.
-It will provide a defensible excuse for those in power
to indefinitely postpone any meaningful demonstration of
conclusive results, and thus full accountability, in their expanding
martial forays abroad (except, of course, when it is politically
expedient to declare that a successful end is at hand in a
particular situation).
- It similarly will provide an excuse for the continued
neglect of other critical national (especially “soft" domestic)
priorities — Social Security, health care, education, the environ­
ment — in favor of war’s overriding importance.
-It will aggravate the undisciplined, unchecked practice
of prolonged deficit spending that threatens to produce severe
economic stagnations and budgetary crisis, especially as baby
boomers become eligible for retirement.
- It will perpetuate the use of “emergency" supplemental
military spending to circumvent the checks of the regular budget
process and surreptitiously pad a bloated, gluttonous defense
budget.
- It will lend continuing tacit legitimacy to the regularized
use of force as a first (rather than a last) resort, diminishing the
legitimacy and desirability of time-consuming, seemingly less
decisive diplomacy.
-It will further blur the lines of demarcation between
war and peace, domestic and international, military and police,
criminal justice and intelligence, normalcy and emergency. The
blurring of lines among military, police and intelligence activities
will make the military less accountable to civilian authority.
- It will further threaten civil liberties, marginalize dissent
and dissenters as unpatriotic, heighten government secrecy at
the expense of transparency and engender continuing media
self-censorship, all in the name of necessity, urgency and clear
and present danger.
-It will perpetuate the self-serving Pentagon mythology
of defense transformation by fostering the misleading impression
that the rhetorical commitment to the Long War is matched by an
underlying reality of overhaul in military missions, structure and
capabilities.
-It will accentuate the alienation of the military from
society in two ways: first, by reinforcing the belief of those
in uniform that they are especially at risk and making undue
sacrifices on behalf of a soft, lazy, unappreciative public; second,
by exacerbating recruiting shortfalls and the attendant prospect
of an increasingly unrepresentative force.
America's ruling elite has once again opted for rhetorical
contrivance and the politics of fear over bold creative strategic
leadership expected of the world’s self-proclaimed only super­
power.
Mesmerized by their own logic, they have failed to
recognize that perpetual war can never lead to the ideal state
of perpetual peace that Immanuel Kant spoke of over two
centuries ago. It can only drain us of all we are and possess
Gregory D. Foster is a professor at the Industrial College
of the Armed Forces at the National Defense University He
wrote this article for The Baltimore Sun The views expressed
are his own
idea about how many people were killed; the reporting is pretty
choppy It’s not an easy thing At the same time I think there’s a
kind of numbness that's developed in our body politic where it's
not that we re adverse to the bad news, it's you’re not bringing
me any bad news lately, so why are we spending so much time
on this coverage? I think that's happening in local newsrooms
and in decisions about what to report I think the President has
been very effective in his blitz on the American people with his
array of speeches to prop up American support. I think we have
unfortunately fallen for the argument that says we have to limit
our own discussion of an antiwar nature lest our troops lose
heart, and that we can’t fail to support our troops when there’s
never been any relation between troop morale over there and
what you and I are talking about or what we are doing about
protesting the war. This Washington based war has from the
start also turned into a Washington focal point for political
attitudes, and I think the media has generally failed us from
the start in thinking not only about the prospects for going to
war but in talking about the character of the war. The media,
has fallen hook-line-and-sinker for the notion that the real issue
is establishing an Iraqi government and averting civil war.
It is interesting to ask public audiences as I have:
Does the United States plan to have permanent military bases in
Iraq? Good business people stand up at Rotary Clubs and say,
'No. Secretary Rumsfeld says we seek no permanent military
bases.” They don’t understand that most of what American
troops have been doing for the last three months is hardening
and fastening at least three of those bases, maybe as many as
six, because there is one scenario that says that if this thing
goes even worse than it’s going now, we essentially take a third
of the troops and hunker down in the bases.
We have a contingent of National Guard in Iraq from
northern Indiana that includes many of our folks who are in the
state police who are set to go over for the third time. As I am
sure is happening in other communities, this is hitting people
here pretty hard and I detect great loyalty among those troops,
but there's not a lot of smiles on these faces and their families
are starting to get pretty bitter I’ve heard even local employers
who are some of our most loyal folks to the military, say they
don’t know how long they can keep jobs open when the govern­
ment sends their reservist and National Guard employees to
Iraq three times.
These are people who are making ultimate sacrifices
and I think when they're there the camaraderie and training,
the leadership, the spectrum of values they believe in is carrying
them through some tough times. What I worry about is when
they come home. I know what we’ve seen in our section here,
the impact on marriages and families I worry about the people
who come back. The good news is that we are saving more and
more people than we have ever saved before We re talking on
the average of 18,000 troops wounded — ’more than half of
those in Vietnam or earlier wars would be dead But that means
people are coming back with devastating life-changing wounds,
which also places a very heavy burden on their families and their
surrounding communities.
George Lopez is senior fellow at the Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies at Notre Dame University. This
article is excerpted from a live interview by Jim Wilkins on the
April 7, 2006 ‘Friday’ program on KMUN-FM.
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