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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (447005)	8/24/2003 1:01:28 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Respond to of 769667

Oh yeah kenny, where did you get that notion. I wonder did you even read that excellent article. It was after all in the ny-times. Can you give us any comment on if you agree of don't agree on anything. What I read seemed to make a lot of sense.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (447005)	8/24/2003 1:13:52 PM
From: Gordon A. Langston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

I'm not sure how we knew the cost of the Marshall plan up front. That seems like a stretch. newsday.com Real 'Marshall Plans' Don't Come Cheap By Rachel Bronson Rachel Bronson is a senior fellow and director of Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is from the Los Angeles Times. August 6, 2003 House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was in Israel advocating a "Marshall Plan" for the Palestinians. Proposing new Marshall plans seems to have become common political sport. In an April 2002 speech at the Virginia Military Institute, President George W. Bush invoked the Marshall Plan to illustrate what was necessary for rebuilding Afghanistan. Before the war against Iraq, the president and his advisers regularly referred to the American success of reconstructing Germany and Japan after World War II under the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan was the height of American generosity and internationalism. After World War II, the Truman administration realized that Washington's massive loan program was not making any headway against Europe's social and economic problems. So Secretary of State George C. Marshall began an effort to build grassroots support for a massive grant program, an exhausting campaign he likened to a run for the presidency. But let's remember what it really took to make post-conflict reconstruction successful in the European context. In current dollars, the United States poured about $79 billion into Europe between 1948 and 1952, with most of it coming in the first two years. Germany alone received $8 billion. Over its four-year life, the Marshall Plan cost the U.S. between 2.5 percent and 5 percent of its national income. Today that would amount to no less than $200 billion a year. According to Marshall, the money was needed to reconstruct "the entire fabric of the European economy." In his famous 1947 Harvard speech, he stated "under the arbitrary and destructive Nazi rule, virtually every possible enterprise was geared into the German war machine." Germany was left with a mutated economic infrastructure in desperate need of transformation. As a point of comparison, Iraq's Baath Party held power 23 years longer than the Nazis. But it took more than money to reconstruct Germany. After the war, law and order was a pressing problem. Accordingly, the United States took 30,000 of the nearly 100,000 war-weary U.S. soldiers still in Germany and ordered them to assume policing duties. A newly formed constabulary was issued special boots, .45-caliber pistols and horses in order to deal with the likelihood of riots and local scuffles. Each brigade was even assigned a veterinarian. Today, what is so striking about all this loose talk of new Marshall plans is how little prepared we are to put anything behind it. In Afghanistan, between 2001 and today, the United States has committed about $2 billion in assistance to the Afghan people. After the end of the Iraq war, Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the American people that it would cost taxpayers $1.7 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq; a Council on Foreign Relations study published in January showed that restoring the energy grid alone could cost up to $20 billion. Not surprisingly, the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has recently acknowledged that the problems in Iraq are a lot worse than the administration anticipated and would require serious commitment. Of course, Iraq, Afghanistan and a future Palestine are not Germany, and critics rightly point to all the problems with the comparison. Germany was a defeated country, not a liberated one. The Iraqis and Afghans do not have the same experience with democracy as the Germans did. Americans are not as fluent in the language and culture of the Palestinians as they were with the Germans. All this suggests that our task will be more difficult in the Mideast than it was in Germany. The administration should come clean with the American people. If we are to re-create the Mideast as we did Europe, it will be expensive in terms of lives and resources. It is worth it, but the case must be made. The American people supported the president's march to war, in no small part because they bought his argument that Iraq could become a model of democracy for the region. Public support is there to be mobilized, but it will not come automatically. Until the administration fully acknowledges the depth of the commitment made on behalf of the American people by Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and George Marshall, it should be a little bit more humble when invoking the Marshall Plan's good name.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (447005)	8/24/2003 1:15:52 PM
From: CYBERKEN	Respond to of 769667

Historically-challanged one: No one is talking about the "Marshall Plan". The Marshall Plan had NOTHING to do with George Marshall's military accomplishments. George Marshall took a thoroughly obsolete army that had been badly beaten up in the last months of WWI and re-organized it from top to bottom into a machine that swept across Europe and the Pacific, ending WWII years before anyone expected it was possible. Were it not for George Marshall's ability as a military planner and organizer, all of Europe-right up to the channel coast-would have spent half-a century under Nazism or Stalinism. Donald Rumsfeld-like Marshall-has the vision to see the obvious. The obvious today is that: Massing of troops is totally ineffective against enemies who use terrorism. It is useless to stand a division in the field anymore. A division that takes 8 to 10 weeks to travel from the Eastern Mediterranian to the Persian Gulf and deploy for war is as worthless as no division at all-perhaps MORE worthless. Any hardware that won't fit on a transport plane-along with its intensely-trained personnel, is a damned MUSEUM piece, and a massive waste of taxpayer's money. Thus it is no wonder that the Democrat Treason Lobby has no trouble finding ex-general poltroons to aid them in their political campaign against the American people. When you drag the US military, kicking and screaming, into the modern world, you have to do it over the bodies of endless sacred cows. But while the Great Social Security Welfare Fraud is a crime against humanity and civilization, a state-of-the-art military capability is required, and the alternative is unacceptable. Don Rumsfeld will be remembered in history as a peer of George Marshall...