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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (73771)	1/14/2007 3:25:15 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Bush's latest initiatives -- like all his earlier ones -- will not produce the desired political result, because Americans cannot accomplish political objectives in Iraq. Trapped by Hubris, Again Editorial By Robert G. Kaiser* The Washington Post Sunday, January 14, 2007; B01 After nearly four years of ineffectual war-fighting, after the collapse of domestic support for President Bush and his policies, after the expenditure of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, it no longer seems possible to avoid the grim conclusion: For the United States, Iraq has become another Vietnam. Fortunately, the overall death toll in Iraq so far, while high, is still smaller than it was in Vietnam. But tragically, the most important difference between the two conflicts may be that defeat in Iraq is likely to produce catastrophic consequences for that nation, its neighbors and the United States, too. For a gray-haired journalist whose career included 18 months covering the Vietnam War for The Washington Post, it is a source of amazement to realize that my country has done this again. We twice took a huge risk in the hope that we could predict and dominate events in a nation whose history we did not know, whose language few of us spoke, whose rivalries we didn't understand, whose expectations for life, politics and economics were all foreign to many Americans. Both times, we put our fate in the hands of local politicians who would not follow U.S. orders, who did not see their country's fate the way we did, and who could not muster the support of enough of their countrymen to produce the outcome Washington wanted. In Vietnam as in Iraq, U.S. military power alone proved unable to achieve the desired political objectives. How did this happen again? After all, we're Americans -- practical, common-sense people who know how to get things done. Or so we'd like to think. In truth, we are ethnocentric to a fault, certain of our own superiority, convinced that others see us as we do, blithely indifferent to cultural, religious, political and historical realities far different from our own. These failings -- more than any tactical or strategic errors -- help explain the U.S. catastrophes in Vietnam and Iraq. Future historians trying to understand how the U.S. adventure in Iraq went so badly off track will be grateful for the memorandum that national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley wrote to Bush on Nov. 8, 2006, after a visit to Iraq. The "secret" memo was leaked to the New York Times three weeks later. Hadley began with a candid evaluation of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: "The reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action." Having been frank about the problem, Hadley then entered a dream world to discuss ways in which it might be solved. He offered his boss an elaborate set of initiatives that should be urged on the hapless Maliki. The first one gives a good flavor of the Hadley plan for success: "Maliki should compel his ministers to take small steps -- such as providing health services and opening bank branches in Sunni neighborhoods -- to demonstrate that his government serves all ethnic communities." Others included compelling Maliki to overhaul his personal staff to make it ethnically diverse, shake up his cabinet and bring in competent technocrats, and insist that all ministers renounce violence in all forms. How would Bush carry out Hadley's correctives? "We can help [him] in a variety of ways," Hadley wrote. If Maliki thinks he isn't in a position to follow all of the Americans' good advice, "we will need to work with him to augment his capabilities." Among the steps Hadley proposed: "Actively support Maliki in helping him develop an alternative political base. We would likely need to use our own political capital to press moderates to align themselves with Maliki's new political bloc. . . . Consider monetary support to moderate groups that have been seeking to break with larger, more sectarian parties, as well as to support Maliki himself. . . . Provide Maliki with more resources to help build a nonsectarian national movement." In other words, the national security adviser told the president 42 months after this disastrous war began that we can still fix it. A few well-placed bribes plus Yankee ingenuity -- pulling this lever, pushing that button -- can make things turn out the way we want them to. There you see the peculiar strain of hubris that led the United States astray four years ago in Iraq, and four decades ago in Vietnam. Indeed, Hadley's memo is squarely in the tradition of the sublimely arrogant know-it-alls whom journalist David Halberstam memorably dubbed "The Best and the Brightest." These were the men around John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson who, along with Kennedy and Johnson, gave us the Vietnam War: Robert S. McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Walt W. Rostow and the rest. They, too, allowed themselves to believe that the shrewd application of U.S. power -- pulling a lever here, pushing a button there -- could create and prop up an independent, democratic South Vietnam. This was something that had never existed previously -- in that sense, something sadly akin to a multiethnic, democratic Iraq. Yet in his speech to the nation Wednesday night announcing changes in Iraq policy, the president embraced many of Hadley's proposals. He has extracted promises from Maliki to crack down on Shiite militias and has pushed the prime minister to broaden his cabinet. Bush also took Hadley's advice to increase the number of U.S. troops operating in Baghdad, and to broaden the program that embeds Americans with Iraqi units. Last week, Bush seemed to threaten Maliki as well: "If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people -- and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people," the president said. The United States has always been good at telling other nations what they have to do, and what will happen if they don't do it. When things began to go wrong in Vietnam, we helped stage a coup against Ngo Dinh Diem, whom the United States had helped to install as president of South Vietnam. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had once called him Asia's "miracle man." Diem was dumped in 1963. Eight changes in leadership, all involving Washington in one way or another, ended with Nguyen Van Thieu's ascent to the presidency in 1967; Thieu then held on for eight years before being ousted nine days before North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon. We never did find "the right guy" for Vietnam, to borrow Bush's recent description of Maliki, and there is scant evidence that the man who botched the execution of Saddam Hussein is really the right guy for Iraq, either. We accomplished a great deal during the 14 years we were actively engaged in South Vietnam. We created an infrastructure for the country, built roads and schools and hospitals, trained hundreds of thousands of troops, figured out how to "pacify" the countryside. As long as U.S. military power was available to neutralize the fighting force of North Vietnam -- whose communist leaders were determined to expel the Americans and reunify their country -- South Vietnam could survive, even prosper. But we could not create a government or an economy in South Vietnam that could survive without our generous help. When I was leaving Vietnam in August 1970, I wrote in these pages about how we had made the Vietnamese utterly dependent on us. At the time, the Nixon administration's policy was "Vietnamization" -- turning the war over to the South Vietnamese. But the South Vietnamese had not shown that they could cope without us. "Even if the policy succeeds," I wrote, "the United States may well be unable to redeem the lives, money and self esteem it invested in the war in Vietnam." The Vietnamese communists had key advantages that the U.S. side couldn't match: a better army, more determined and more competent leaders, and a political legitimacy that they had earned by expelling the French colonizers. And they were fighting for a unified Vietnam. Iraq is different. The "enemy" there is not a single group of Iraqis, but nearly all Iraqis, because Iraqis do not share a common definition of their state or a common agenda for its future. This disarray has been compounded by the presence of Islamic fanatics from countries that have seized the opportunity to go to Iraq to try to kill Americans. Polls and reporting by Post correspondents suggest that, overwhelmingly, Iraqis of all factions want U.S. forces to leave. In the face of chaos, the United States has no reliable ally -- no legitimate political authority that crosses sectarian lines and attracts the loyalty of large numbers of Iraqis. Which Iraqis will risk their lives to promote Washington's idea of Iraq? The army and police defend sectarian, not national, interests, even when they are fighting the same people U.S. troops are fighting. The Iraqis who would presumably have been most supportive of a modernizing and democratic Iraq -- the secular intelligentsia that thrived in Iraq until the Persian Gulf War -- is now dramatically depleted. Hundreds of thousands of these Iraqis have already fled to other countries, including many doctors, lawyers, academics and other trained professionals. The war has created a vacuum in the upper reaches of Iraqi society. What's the lesson to be learned? Modesty. Before initiating a war of choice -- and Vietnam and Iraq both qualify -- define the goal with honesty and precision, then analyze what means will be needed to achieve it. Be certain you really understand the society you propose to transform. And never gamble that the political solution to such an adventure will somehow materialize after the military operation has begun. Without a plausible political plan and strong local support at the outset, military operations alone are unlikely to produce success. Bush's latest initiatives -- like all his earlier ones -- will not produce the desired political result, because Americans cannot accomplish political objectives in Iraq. Americans are outsiders, occupiers, foreigners in every sense of the word. Only Iraqis have a chance of finding a political resolution for their divisions. So now we await the fate of this latest gamble like a high roller in Las Vegas watching a roulette ball in a spinning wheel. We have about as much control over the situation as the gambler has of that ball. The outcome is out of our hands, and it would be foolish to bet that we will like the way the conflict ends. *Robert G. Kaiser, an associate editor of The Post, covered the Vietnam War in 1969 and 1970.

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (73771)	1/15/2007 11:09:22 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Major investment bank issues warning on strike against Iran rawstory.com Warning that investors might be "in for a shock," a major investment bank has told the financial community that a preemptive strike by Israel with American backing could hit Iran's nuclear program, RAW STORY has learned. The banking division of ING Group released a memo on Jan. 9 entitled "Attacking Iran: The market impact of a surprise Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities." ING is a global financial services company of Dutch origin that includes banking, insurance, and other divisions. The report was authored by Charles Robinson, the Chief Economist for Emerging Europe, Middle East, and Africa. He also authored an update in ING's daily update, Prophet, that further underscored the bank's perception of the risks of an attack. ING's Robertson admitted that an attack on Iran was "high impact, if low probability," but explained some of the reasons why a strike might go forward. The Jan. 9 dispatch, describes Israel as "not prepared to accept the same doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ that kept the peace during the Cold War. Israel is adamant that this is not an option for such a geographically small country....So if Israel is convinced Iran is aiming to develop a nuclear weapon, it must presumably act at some point." Sketching out the time line for an attack, Robertson says that "we can be fairly sure that if Israel is going to act, it will be keen to do so while Bush and Cheney are in the White House." Robertson suggests a February-March 2007 timeframe for several reasons. First, there is a comparable situation to Israel's strike on Iraq's nuclear program in 1981, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's political troubles within Israel. Second, late February will see Iran's deadline to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 1737, and Israel could use a failure of Iran and the UN to follow through as justification for a strike. Finally, greater US military presence in the region at that time could be seen by Israel as the protection from retaliation that it needs. In his Jan. 15 update, Robertson points to a political reason that could make the assault more likely – personnel changes in the Bush administration may have sidelined opponents of attacking Iran. Preisdent Bush recently removed General John Abizaid as commander of US forces in the Middle East and John Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence, both of whom have said attacking Iran is not a priority or the right move at this time. The deployment of Patriot missile batteries, highlighted in President Bush's recent White House speech on America's Iraq policy, also pointed to a need to defend against Iranian missiles. The ING memo was first sent to RAW STORY as an anonymous tip and confirmed Monday by staff in the bank's emerging markets office, who passed along the Jan. 15 update. The full PDF documents can be downloaded at this link for the Jan. 9 report, and this link for the Jan. 15 update. A screenshot of the first page is provided below.

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (73771)	1/17/2007 3:31:04 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy ______________________________________________________________ By DAVID LEONHARDT Economix The New York Times January 17, 2007 The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same. The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions. For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives. Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds. The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur. All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another: The war in Iraq. In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so. These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out. But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington. That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending. The two best-known analyses of the war’s costs agree on this figure, but they diverge from there. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion on the war. They include a number of indirect costs, like the economic stimulus that the war funds would have provided if they had been spent in this country. Mr. Wallsten, who worked with Katrina Kosec, another economist, argues for a figure closer to $1 trillion in today’s dollars. My own estimate falls on the conservative side, largely because it focuses on the actual money that Americans would have been able to spend in the absence of a war. I didn’t even attempt to put a monetary value on the more than 3,000 American deaths in the war. Besides the direct military spending, I’m including the gas tax that the war has effectively imposed on American families (to the benefit of oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia). At the start of 2003, a barrel of oil was selling for $30. Since then, the average price has been about $50. Attributing even $5 of this difference to the conflict adds another $150 billion to the war’s price tag, Ms. Bilmes and Mr. Stiglitz say. The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion. And if this war’s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam’s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, “It’s like a miniature Medicare.” In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California. Whatever number you use for the war’s total cost, it will tower over costs that normally seem prohibitive. Right now, including everything, the war is costing about $200 billion a year. Treating heart disease and diabetes, by contrast, would probably cost about $50 billion a year. The remaining 9/11 Commission recommendations — held up in Congress partly because of their cost — might cost somewhat less. Universal preschool would be $35 billion. In Afghanistan, $10 billion could make a real difference. At the National Cancer Institute, annual budget is about $6 billion. “This war has skewed our thinking about resources,” said Mr. Wallsten, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative-leaning research group. “In the context of the war, $20 billion is nothing.” As it happens, $20 billion is not a bad ballpark estimate for the added cost of Mr. Bush’s planned surge in troops. By itself, of course, that price tag doesn’t mean the surge is a bad idea. If it offers the best chance to stabilize Iraq, then it may well be the right option. But the standard shouldn’t simply be whether a surge is better than the most popular alternative — a far-less-expensive political strategy that includes getting tough with the Iraqi government. The standard should be whether the surge would be better than the political strategy plus whatever else might be accomplished with the $20 billion. This time, it would be nice to have that discussion before the troops reach Iraq. leonhardt@nytimes.com

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (73771)	2/5/2007 1:56:51 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Corners cut in rush to add troops __________________________________________________________ Shorter training time, lack of equipment hurt readiness, experts say By Anna Badkhen San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, February 4, 2007 Soldiers of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division had so little time between deployments to Iraq they had to cram more than a year's worth of training into four months. Some had only a few days to learn how to fire their new rifles before they deployed to Iraq -- for the third time -- last month. They had no access to the heavily armored vehicles they will be using in Iraq, so they trained on a handful of old military trucks instead. And some soldiers were assigned to the brigade so late that they had no time to train in the United States at all. Instead of the yearlong training recommended prior to deployment, they prepared for war during the two weeks they spent in Kuwait, en route to Anbar, Iraq's deadliest province. As the Pentagon prepares to boost troop levels in Iraq by 21,500 people, such logistical and training hurdles are emblematic of the struggles besieging a military strained by unexpectedly long and grueling commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. "It's happening just about to all the units now," said Lawrence Korb, who oversaw military manpower and logistics as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. "No unit is completely combat ready." Lawmakers consider the situation so serious that they plan to question Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about troop readiness on Wednesday, when the officials are scheduled to testify before the House Armed Services Committee, said a spokeswoman for one of its influential members, Rep. Solomon Ortiz, D-Texas. The lack of overall preparedness, in terms of both training and key equipment, is underscored by a recent Pentagon survey, statements by military leaders and interviews with defense experts. "A typical soldier shows up in Iraq without the knowledge of the language, without the knowledge of the people," said Loren Thompson, defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a centrist think tank in Arlington, Va. "If he also isn't experienced with his unit or with his weapon, that maximizes the potential for disaster." A survey conducted by the Defense Department Inspector General's Office last spring found that U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan lack sufficient armored vehicles, heavy weapons such as artillery or large machine guns, devices designed to jam signals used to detonate roadside bombs, and communications equipment. As a result, they are sometimes forced to put off operations while they wait for equipment, according to the classified report, a summary of which the Defense Department made public on Tuesday. "They don't have enough humvees, they don't have enough (armored) trucks," Ortiz, who chairs the Readiness Subcommittee at the House Armed Services Committee, told The Chronicle. "It's getting to the point when they have to share the equipment." Instead of the newer, better-protected humvees, for example, the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, based at Fort Stewart, Ga., will use the older version of heavily armored humvees left behind by the 1st Armor Division, said Lt. Col. Doug Crissman, commander of the brigade's 2-7 infantry battalion. Ortiz said such protracted use increases the wear and tear on the vehicles and makes them more likely to break down. More troubling, the armor on these older humvees is increasingly unable to withstand the blast of the ever-more powerful bombs employed by insurgents, say military experts. In December, roadside bombs caused about 60 percent of all U.S. casualties in Iraq, the Pentagon reported. "We are fighting a thinking enemy who is trying very hard to kill us," Marine Brig. Gen. Randolph Alles, head of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, told a congressional panel last month. Upgrading humvee armor, which involves shipping the vehicles to the United States, "takes the better part of a year, and meanwhile, the threat has morphed," Thompson said. "We never get ahead of the threat." But even the new, upgraded humvees are "still not suited for this kind of war," Thompson said. For example, the flat bottoms of the humvees do not deflect the blasts from roadside bombs and instead direct them into the trucks in a way that maximizes the potential damage from the blast to the troops inside. The military is planning to buy thousands of new armored mine-protected vehicles, known as cougars and buffaloes, whose V-shaped hulls deflect blasts from beneath. Lt. Gen. Stephen Speakes, the Army's top supply officer, told the Baltimore Sun that military commanders in Iraq have asked for at least 6,465 such vehicles. But these vehicles would not reach Iraq until March 2008, military officials told the House Armed Services Committee last month. The main reason for the equipment crunch is that the Pentagon had not expected the war in Iraq to last so long and was not financially prepared for such a grueling commitment, said Korb, who now is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information. "They thought they'd be down to 30,000 troops by the end of (2006), so they didn't start accelerating equipment purchases," Korb said. Not only did the deployment last much longer than the military leaders had expected, but the cost of equipment and training has also skyrocketed. As the conflict continued, the cost of basic equipment -- helmets, rifles and body armor -- more than tripled, from $7,000 in 1999 to $25,000 last year, the Wall Street Journal reported in December. The cost of a humvee, once unarmored, has grown seven-fold, to about $225,000 from $32,000 in 2001. As a result of rising costs, the purchases of basic equipment lagged. After the Cold War, U.S. military policy -- pushed hard by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's policy of "transformation" -- relied too much on cutting-edge technology and air power and too little on boots on the ground, and further undercut spending on equipment that would protect large ground forces, critics charge. Although this approach worked in Afghanistan -- where two months of U.S. aerial bombardment overwhelmed the ruling Taliban militia -- and helped topple the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, it hinders the U.S. ability to fight the protracted counterinsurgency campaigns that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have since become, some analysts say. "We had the Air Force moving forward with all the procurement, we had the Navy investing and modernizing every piece," said Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives based in Cambridge, Mass. "You didn't have anything like that in the Army. Nobody foresaw that we would be sitting in the desert for such a long period of time fighting an insurgency." To compensate for the dearth of equipment and to meet "immediate wartime needs," the military has been borrowing gear from units stationed in the United States, depleting their ability to respond in case of other military threats around the world, Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker told the House Armed Services Committee last month. "This practice, which we are continuing today, increases risk for our next-to-deploy units and limits our ability to respond to emerging strategic contingencies," Schoomaker said. It also leaves the troops in the United States to train on equipment that is often completely different from the gear they will be using in Iraq. For example, the 2-7 battalion had to train on obsolete models of humvees that are no longer used in Iraq, said Crissman, the battalion commander. "We trained with a smaller set of equipment, and I will admit that presented some challenges," Crissman told The Chronicle before his unit left for Iraq. The 2-7 also had no time to train at Fort Irwin in California's Mojave Desert, where Arabic-speaking role players and trainers simulate conditions of battling Iraqi insurgents. Instead, they conducted a three-week exercise in the forest of towering pines and oaks hung with Spanish moss outside the division's base at Fort Stewart, Ga. Such deficiencies decrease the level of troop readiness, said Korb. "There's gonna be more killed and wounded," he said, "because they are just not ready." sfgate.com