Month: May 2005

Current estimates go as high as $300 billion. That’s $300 billion dollars the invasion of Iraq is going to cost US taxpayers. Some day. Maybe more.

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UPDATE: As hilzoy wisely notes in the comments:

It will certainly be more. Since, as you note, this will just be added to the deficit, we will have to pay debt service on it. And anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage and looked at the total amount they will pay by the end of the 30 year term, and seen how very much more it is than the original price of the house (even at what my spam keeps assuring me are Today’s Low Rates!), knows that the debt service on $300 billion will be a lot of money.

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On Friday, October 11, 2002, Congress voted to authorize Bush to attack Iraq if Hussein refused to give up WMD as required by U.N. resolutions. Shortly after that we heard a range of estimates for what such action would cost.

In January 2003, the White House was downplaying reports that the effort could cost as much as $60 billion:

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels told The New York Times in an interview published Tuesday that such a conflict could cost $50 billion to $60 billion — the price tag of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

But Trent Duffy, an OMB spokesman, said Daniels did not intend to imply in the Times interview that $50 billion to $60 billion was a hard White House estimate.

"He said it could — could — be $60 billion," Duffy said. "It is impossible to know what any military campaign would ultimately cost. The only cost estimate we know of in this arena is the Persian Gulf War, and that was a $60 billion event."

Duffy also was careful to caution that President Bush had not made a decision to use military force against Saddam’s regime.

Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey had estimated closer to $200 billion, but he was dumped by the White House. Apparently his skills at such estimates were not appreciated.

And we were told repeatedly that the recontruction costs would not come out of our pockets, but rather, those of the Iraqis:

1. “Well, the reconstruction costs remain a very — an issue for the future. And Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, is a rather wealthy country. Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.” Press Secretary Ari Fleischer (February 18, 2003)
2. “There’s 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…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” Paul Wolfowitz [Source: House Committee on Appropriations Hearing on a Supplemental War Regulation, 3/27/03]
3. “I don’t believe that the United States has the responsibility for reconstruction, in a sense…[Reconstruction] funds can come from those various sources I mentioned: frozen assets, oil revenues and a variety of other things, including the Oil for Food, which has a very substantial number of billions of dollars in it. Donald Rumsfeld [Source: Senate Appropriations Hearing, 3/27/03] (emphasis mine)

Compare that last statement, in particular, with this:

President Bush said Monday that seeing Iraq through reconstruction to a stable and secure democracy is a worthy cause that the United States will press regardless of whether its coalition partners remain there.

"The fundamental question is: Is it worth it? And the answer is, ‘Absolutely, it’s worth it for a free Iraq to emerge’," said Bush….

Bush considers it worth it.

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by hilzoy

***UPDATE: Newsweek is stepping back from this story:

“Their [the reporters’] information came from a knowledgeable U.S. government source, and before deciding whether to publish it we approached two separate Defense Department officials for comment. One declined to give us a response; the other challenged another aspect of the story but did not dispute the Qur’an charge. (…)

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur’an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them “not credible.” Our original source later said he couldn’t be certain about reading of the alleged Qur’an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we. But we regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.”

*** [End of Update. What comes next is the original post…]***

Here’s an obvious thought: it’s really, really important that in our efforts to defeat al Qaeda, we not be seen as fighting a war on Islam itself. It’s important because we should not actually be fighting a war on Islam, but on Islamic terrorists, who bear about the same relation to Islam that people who blow up abortion clinics bear to Christianity. And it’s important because it would be disastrous if ordinary Muslims, who might otherwise not support al Qaeda, got the idea that they had to defend Islam itself against us. This is not exactly rocket science.

Unfortunately, it seems to have eluded some of our interrogators at Guantanamo. From Newsweek:

“Investigators probing abuses at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, placed Qur’ans on toilets and, in at least one case, flushed a holy book down the toilet.”

In light of this, I transfer to Newsweek and its reporters this quote from the original post: “Way to go, guys. Way to make us all proud.”

Flushing a Qur’an down the toilet. Gosh, that’s really helpful. I hope they got a lot of useful information that way, given the consequences:

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As you’ve probably read by now, the US Army is suspending all recruitment efforts for one day of retraining because of a string of ethics violations, which some recruiters are saying is related to the pressure on them to meet quotas. This retraining comes on the heels of news that the Army and Marines are both having trouble reaching their recruitment goals. Nearly all reports suggest the unpopularity of the Iraq war is a large factor in this, but there’s no reason with all the violence to imagine we’ll be able to bring significant numbers of the troops there back soon. So what can the Army and Marines do about this problem? In a New York Times article, Damien Cave reported that the Pentagon and marketing experts are brainstorming on four central ideas:

1. Skip the Cash, Use Peer Pressure
2. Create a Military of One
3. Privatize, Privatize, Privatize
4. Tie Military Service to Citizenship

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Via kos, a quote from Seymour Hersh:

“I get a call from a mother. She wants to see me somewhere in northeastern America. I go see her. There’s a kid that was in the unit, the 372nd. They had all come home early. If you remember the timeline, they did their stuff in late 2003, reported in 2004. This mother is telling me — I’m writing in the spring of 2004 — March of 2004, the kid had come home in the same unit totally changed. Young, pretty woman, vibrant. Depressed, disconsolate, inconsolable, isolated. Had been newly married. Left her husband, left the family, moved to a nearby town, working a night job or whatever. And nobody could figure out what’s going on.

She sees the stories about Abu Ghraib. She goes, knocks on the door, shows the young woman the newspaper, and door slams, bam! And at that point, as she tells me, later — as she tells me in real time — this is May, early May — she goes back, the kid had been given a computer, a portable computer like. (…) So she claims — this not a woman familiar with Freud or the unconscious — she claims at that point she just decided to look at the computer after hearing about Abu Ghraib. She said she had — she just hadn’t looked at it. She just was going to clean it up and take it to her office as a second computer. No thoughts. And she is deleting files. She sees a file marked “Iraq.” And she hits it, and out comes 60 or 80 digital photographs of the one that The New Yorker ran of the naked guy standing against a cell in terror, hands behind his back so he can’t protect his private parts, which is the instinct. And two snarling German dogs — shepherds. Somebody said they’re Belgian shepherds, perhaps, but two snarling shepherds, you know, on each side of him. And the sequence — in the sequence, the dogs attack the man, blood all over. (…)

So she looks at this stuff and eventually calls me. And we do it all, and we get permission. We run the photographs, just one — how much — and the thought there of the editors was how much do you humiliate the Arab world and the Arab man. One is enough. You know, we can describe what else is on the picture. We just don’t need more than one. And then, later the mother calls me back, and we became friends. This happens a lot to people in my business. You get to like people. And she says, you know, one thing I didn’t tell you that you have to know about the young woman, when she came back, every weekend, she would go and get herself tattooed, and eventually, she said, she was filling her body with large, black tattoos, and eventually, they filled up every portion of her skin, was tattooed, at least all the portions you could see, and there was no reason to make assumptions about the other portions. She was tattooed completely. It was as if, the mother said, she wanted to change her skin.” (emphasis added.)

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I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what it takes to kill your enemy during war, and keep killing them. I’m sure I have some more thinking to do on the subject (…hey, that’s what blogs are for, no?), but I’ve come to some preliminary conclusions I want to put out there.

In the "Who Defeated the Nazi’s" thread, constant reader Phil posted an excerpt from a review of a book by Uwe Timm, a German whose brother died trying to kill Russians, but not before complaining about the way the English were bombing Germany in a letter:

The diary also reveals what Timm regards as German disregard for suffering anywhere except in Germany. [His brother] Karl-Heinz writes, " I’m worried about everyone at home, we hear reports of air raids by the English every day. If only they’d stop that filthy business. It’s not war, it’s the murder of women and children — it’s inhumane ." To which Timm responds:

"It is hard to comprehend and impossible to trace the way sympathy and compassion in the face of suffering could be blanked out, while a distinction emerged between humanity at home and humanity here in Russia. In Russia, the killing of civilians is normal, everyday work, not even worth mentioning; at home it is murder. . . . I have now read other diaries and letters of the time; some observe the suffering of the civilian population and express outrage, others speak of the killing of civilians — Jews and Russians alike — as the most natural thing in the world. The language they’ve been fed makes killing easier: inferior human beings, parasites, vermin whose lives are dirty, degenerate, brutish. Smoking them out is a hygienic measure."

That strikes me as the essence of maintaining the will to kill: "the way sympathy and compassion in the face of suffering could be blanked out," but whereas Timm feels it’s impossible to trace, I feel there must be some identifiable paths to this state of mind.

So I asked myself: If you want to maintain your nation’s willingness to kill other people, what emotional strings do you pull? What tools do you use to blank out sympathy and compassion in the face of suffering?

Now you all know I opposed the invasion of Iraq, so I’m not going to pretend I’m objective here. I will attempt to be fair though. I think there are three primary tools nations can use to maintain their populace’s will to kill: fear, information operations, and the rhetoric of "the other."

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