Who Will Save Our Souls?

This is a momentous day:  

'President Barack Obama marked the end of the U.S. war in Iraq with a salute to American troops at a military base central to the fight and a pledge to support veterans who are returning home to face a difficult economy.

'As your commander in chief, and on behalf of a grateful nation, I'm proud to finally say these two words,' Obama told soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army Special Operations Command. 'Welcome home.'
…
A promise to end the conflict in Iraq was a central element of Obama's campaign for the presidency in 2008. When he took office in January 2009, there were almost 150,000 troops in Iraq. That number has shrunk to less than 8,000 and the number of U.S. military bases in the country has fallen to five from 505. When the pullout is complete, the U.S. presence will be at the embassy in Baghdad, with an array of diplomats, military advisers and contractors.

'There is something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long,' Obama told troops."

Indeed there is. Former President George W. Bush, using a duplicitous and fraudulent Congressional authorization, invaded Iraq under false premises in March 2003. The bases for that authorization—that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and maintained active links to al Qaeda making it a direct and imminent threat to the U.S.—were utterly false.

Declaring a doctine of pre-emption, Bush claimed the right for the U.S. to invade any country anytime U.S. leaders perceive an imminent threat to U.S. national security. Many, even some in the military, believe this doctrine and the actions justified by it are in violation not only of "just war" theory but also international law. In other words, the war itself is a war crime.

As a result of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld criminal push for war, 4,483 U.S. troops died in Iraq, 3,531 in combat.  As well, official sources note 33,183 U.S. service -men and -women were wounded in Iraq. That number is disputed, and some believe it may be three times that many.

The number of Iraqi civilian dead cannot be reliably estimated, but, based on a study that appeared in the British medical journal Lancet, some have estimated the Iraq body count to be over one million. Official tallies fall way short of this number but are nonetheless substantial.

This is why President Obama's announcement today marking the official end of the war in Iraq is so momentous. It puts an official stop to this criminal war. It puts an official stop to the 'justified' wholesale killing of civilians.

But the costs of this war go beyond body counts. The direct economic costs of the war in Iraq, by most accounts, are well over $1 trillion. This does not include the costs of extra spending to care for veterans from combat through 2050, which may itself total over $1 trillion. Nor does it account for interest to be paid on funds borrowed to fund the war.

In 2008, Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz estimated the costs of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. He has since determined that estimate to be too low.  As WoW pointed out at the time, that estimate did not include opportunity costs or what he calls "what if" costs:

"two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?

The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere."

WoW's point was that if those funds squandered in destructive warfare had been put to creative use—investing, say, in green energy sources, shoring up Social Security, developing universal health care, seeding new, productive industries here and even abroad, reducing poverty worldwide, etc.—the potential return on those investments would have made a hugely positive contribution to the standard of living world-wide. Stiglitz, of course, notes that the financial crisis we are currently experiencing is almost certainly attributable to this war.

And this gets to the final component of the costs of this war: the price of our souls. Primarily, the companies that profited from this war are those engaged in arms and weapons manufactury, those providing contractual paramilitary services, and those involved in oilfield services industry. These are the destructive angels of our nature—the killing business, the resource exploitation business. Then, of course, there's their bankers and financiers—the speculators and parasites. The Iraq war has made these folks the Masters of the Universe—or at least elevated their mastery to a whole new level.

We may be able to pay back the economic costs of this war, but it will take time and sacrifice. We might even be able to reclaim our collective souls from the destructive forces that currently have us in their clutches. Occupy, I'd say, is a good start. We can never, however, recover the lives lost, U.S. or Iraqi.

The costs in human lives, the economic and financial costs, and the costs to our soul as a civilization: let us hope that the end to this war can reverse this self-destructive trend and put us on the road to a more creative, healthy, and productive future.

Thank you, President Obama, for putting an end to this atrocity. Frankly, it's about time. I know it has taken a great deal of time and energy on your part. I know you have had to battle the entrenched, corrupt forces of militarism and bureaucratic inertia and war-profiteering to get to this point. But it was the right thing to do. The project now is to figure out how to pay for this disaster without sending the entire world into a further economic tailspin and, simultaneously, recover our wounded souls—the better angels of our nature.

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From Uncle Meat:









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Now shut up 'n play ur guitar:

The Gods of War

You want a 9/11 post on or about the 10th Anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers? You want a frame? Okay, how's this? After 9/11, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld junta unleashed the gods of war and destruction on the peoples of the planet (that includes us Americans, too, by the way), and we are now beginning to reap the consequences. Paying the piper, if you will, at the expense of a creative and productive society which looks after its own and is capable of human charity.

Founding Father James Madison had a few words for the current situation:

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

"Political Observations" (1795-04-20); also in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (1865), Vol. IV, p. 491

The U.S. Department of Defense currently employs 3.2 million people, that's 1% of all Americans. It is the world's biggest employer. Want to know who's second? The Chinese People's Liberation Army at 2.3 million. The FY 2012 budget requests a total of $676 billion for DoD.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University, estimates the total costs of 9/11 to be somewhere between $3-5 trillion. And that, he believes, may be on the conservative side

"Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax “relief” for the wealthy.

Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America’s future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2% of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion – $17,000 for every US household – with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50%.

Moreover, as Bilmes and I argued in our book The Three Trillion Dollar War, the wars contributed to America’s macroeconomic weaknesses, which exacerbated its deficits and debt burden. Then, as now, disruption in the Middle East led to higher oil prices, forcing Americans to spend money on oil imports that they otherwise could have spent buying goods produced in the US.

But then the US Federal Reserve hid these weaknesses by engineering a housing bubble that led to a consumption boom. It will take years to overcome the excessive indebtedness and real-estate overhang that resulted."

Another aspect of these costs is to consider what the money spent on these wars would have purchased if put, instead, to societally productive/creative or socially beneficial uses. These costs, often called "opportunity costs" or "lost opportunity costs", and the return of their investment seem incalculable. Forgone investments in infrastructure and education, interest payments on debt, the development of alternative sources of energy, new industry, tax breaks, all must be factored into the cost of these ruinous foreign adventures. Not to mention the non-financial costs of the loss of freedoms—e.g., having to take your shoes off every time you fly and then having your junk x-rayed, blanket e-surveillance, paranoia and suspicion, xenophobia, mistrust of "the commons" and government. Stuff like that. Oh yeah, and the corruption that took place in government no-bid cost-plus contracting with oil patch industries like Dick Cheney's Haliburton, along with the rise of private mercenary outsourced security armies like BlackWater (aka Xe).

And let's not forget that prior to bankrupting the government, President George W. Bush reorganized it. He centralized "homeland security" functions (an Orwellian concept if ever there was one) into a vast Department of Homeland Security—something incongruously distinguished from the Department of Defense which itself should probably be re-termed the Department of War. The costs associated with this reorganization and its re-tooling to fight the (Orwellian, again) "War on Terror" need also to be included.

The question then rises: is this period of war and destruction the prelude to a period of creation/production and enhanced social welfare? Both Marx and Schumpeter wrote about capitalism's tendency to run in these sorts of self-destructive cycles of self-(re-)creation.

For Nietzsche, "Creation is … inseparable from destruction. This relationship exists only in one direction and does not function when reversed. Denial does not imply affirmation, destruction itself does not lead to creation; this to Nietzsche is the case of the anarchist or the nihilist."

Nihilism is destroying without creating, according to Nietzsche. This seems to me to be the ethos of the the post-9/11 era.

The nihilist blood lust we're seeing among the Tea Party Republicans (see my previous video post: The Party of Death) is the product of this rise of the gods of war.

Life, not Death, should be our organizing principle. Yet, unleashing the gods (dogs) of war cannot be easily undone. They are gods. An era does not end in a day. Creation is hard, risky work. Social security and universal health care are costly. And neither can be achieved while the destructive urges of anarchy and nihilism prevail.

This is the frame, and one in terms of which discourse can be guided.