Academic update

Two days ago, the Louisville Courier Journal ran a list of 34 Kentucky high school seniors who won a $2500 scholarship from the National Merit Scholarship Corp. I am primarily interested in the dupont Manual listings, for obvious reasons:

Manual: Rohun Kulkarni, Amanda L. O'Malley, Claire C. Payne, Daniel L. Pearson and Julian Rippy

Congratulations to Claire and to all the other winners.

A couple of weeks ago, a co-worker's child was also announced as a winner of a National Merit corporate-sponsored scholarship.


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May Day, again

Today, on the fourth anniversary of "mission accomplished," President Bush vetoed the congressional bill that linked Iraq war funding to a troop withdrawal timetable.

The President used strong words to explain his opposition to the bill:

I believe setting a deadline for withdrawal would demoralize the Iraqi people, would encourage killers across the broader Middle East, and send a signal that America will not keep its commitments. Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure

Just like last week, the President claimed that "the surge" is working well. I recently blogged about that over on the Duck of Minerva.

Incidentally, this was Bush's second veto during his 6+ years in the White House.


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Mayday, mayday, mayday

Today is May 1, the third anniversary of President George W. Bush's infamous "mission accomplished" post-flightsuit speech on board the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Instead of declaring that "major combat operations have ended," Bush should perhaps have said "mayday, mayday, mayday."

After all, the latter is an internationally recognized distress call. The signal is used when a vessel is facing "grave and imminent danger" and the caller is "requesting immediate assistance."

While Bush had taken the U.S. to war on the false notion that Iraq posed a "grave and gathering" danger, the truth is that the country faced that problem after he acted. More than three years into the latest Iraq war, 2400 Americans have died.

The military is bogged down in Iraq, leaving few good options to pressure Iran, or North Korea, or any other potential threat.

The Congressional Research Service says that the war cost may now exceed $800 billion. Note that the figure includes the cost of Afghanistan too, but Iraq is easily the bulk of the expense. That's one-third more than the cost of the Vietnam war, in adjusted dollars.

"Mayday, mayday, mayday."


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Filed as: Iraq

Happy anniversary

March 19, 2003, the US went to war against Iraq.

May 1, 2003, the President flew to an aircraft carrier to stand before a banner that read "Mission Accomplished."

This is the third anniversary of the war's start. We can celebrate the third anniversary of the second event nearer to Derby.

If America and Iraq were married, it would traditionally be the leather anniversary. Use your own imagination there...or not.

The Bush administration apparently has a sense of humor about Iraq. After all, they are apparently staging a "photo op" battle.

Personally, I'm wondering who will be handling the anniversary protests. FBI? Local cops? Or maybe they'll outsource it.


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Filed as: Iraq

Avery on the war

Occasional guest blogger Avery hasn't posted here in a long time...largely because I didn't have a late summer vacation this year, what with the May Freedom trip and all.

Anyway, he's found alternative outlets for his views. This was his letter-to-the-editor, Louisville Courier-Journal, August 30:

Maureen Dowd reports that "a majority of Americans now think that going to war was a mistake." But the war was not a mistake. If it had been a mistake, President Bush would be meeting frantically with experts and allies -- not to mention Cindy Sheehan -- attempting to figure out how to cut our losses and get out.

To treat the war as a mistake is to accept the premise that our rulers want what's best for us all, and that they simply miscalculated when choosing this war. But they don't, and they didn't. Instead, they lied about WMDs and 9/11 links . . . intimidated skeptics, manipulated intelligence, outed an undercover CIA agent for political payback, and rolled out their "splendid little war" like a new product in the fall lineup. Then they looted Iraq through no-bid contracts for GOP-affiliated corporations.

This war was no mistake. Mistakes are made by people who are trying to do the right thing. The war was, and is, fundamentally wrong and immoral. And George W. Bush, by remaining on permanent vacation and treating all bad news as ultimately just a PR problem, reveals himself to be a fundamentally immoral man.

It's a shame that our credulous media must go along with the pretense that this was, at worst, all a big mixup. The pretense is clearly false. Our rulers are criminals -- and our journalists are accomplices.

In my view, the Bush administration made a mistake because they miscalculated many of the negative effects of the war.

I think they were very confident of the events of March and April, 2003. Moreover, someone probably imagined the "mission accomplished" moment months before it occurred. A few planners probably thought this would be a good chance to remove the troops from Saudi Arabia, and that a few "remnants" of Saddam's regime might fight back for awhile. All of them probably thought the Iraq war vote would be great in the '02 congressional elections.

But, and this is a major caveat, I'm willing to bet that they badly missed the big picture. Did they expect still to be fighting an insurgency in Iraq 2.5 years after the war began? Probably not.

Fools.

Historical note: costs of unilateralism

Soon, the cost of the Iraq war in dollars is going to exceed 200 billion.

With debate about the future of Iraq heating up, this might be a good time to point out that this cost to America is directly attributable to the Bush administration's unilateralism. Moreover, though it is difficult to know with certainty, much greater global backing might have facilitated the difficult jobs of rebuilding post-war and post-occupation Iraq.

The first Persian Gulf War, by way of comparison, was very cheap for the US because is was largely financed by allied states -- who agreed with the war and the UN Security Council resolutions that authorized it. The war also achieved its admittedly limited objectives quite quickly.

This is from a Washington Post story from December 1, 2002:

Within a month of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the first Bush administration launched what became known as "Operation Tin Cup" -- a frenzied round of diplomacy aimed at getting U.S. allies to help pay for war with Iraq. As a result, the bill to American taxpayers for the Persian Gulf War was about $7 billion, a fraction of its cost.

...the cost of the 1991 war...came to nearly $80 billion in 2002 dollars...In Kuwait, most U.S. troops were able to pack up and go home in a few weeks....In 1991, U.S. taxpayers paid about 12 percent of the military costs of the Gulf War, with the remainder of the burden being shared among such countries as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Germany and Japan.

...[Former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas] Freeman says the U.S. government grossly underestimated the costs of the 1991 war by excluding various services provided free by the Saudis. These included the costs of housing and repatriating Kuwaiti refugees, the provision of free fuel, transport and lodging to coalition forces, and a major environmental cleanup.

The US paid only 12% of the costs, or about $7 billion!

The current war is costing the US nearly $4 billion per month. That means that the US is spending more in Iraq every two months than it did in the entire first Persian Gulf War. Over 400,000 American troops were deployed in anticipation of that war, so it was not a small affair.

The war began March 19, 2003, which was 29 months ago and one week ago. That long after Saddam Hussein surrendered in 1991, Bill Clinton was President!

Twenty-nine months and one week after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the US was a few weeks away from the D-Day landings in Normandy. The Germans had already surrendered in the Crimea.

Within four months, the Germans would use their gas chambers for the last time. Within one year, they would fully surrender to the allies, who celebrated V-E day May 8, 1945.

President Bush stood on an aircraft carrier in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner on May 1, 2003.

Doesn't that seem like ancient history now? Do you suppose he'll ever appear publicly in that flight suit again?

Mission Accomplished? Apparently Not

Fred Kaplan wrote an article for Slate today (thanks to Josh Marshall for the link) called "War Declared, Again; We're not pulling out of Iraq, so it's logical that we're pushing in deeper." Kaplan described a major new offensive ("it's a safe bet the change in policy will go well beyond semantics"):

In a heavily guarded news conference in Baghdad today, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, called the state of conflict there a "war." John Burns, the New York Times correspondent covering the event, quotes Sanchez's aides noting that the general's choice of words was deliberate—his way of injecting realism into the debate back in Washington. "We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy in the heartland of the country," Sanchez stated. That sounds like war, all right.

To reinforce the impression, word also got around today that the White House has called L. Paul Bremer back to Washington for talks. Bremer is the civilian chief of the U.S.-led occupation authority. He left Baghdad quite promptly, deferring a long-scheduled meeting with the Polish prime minister, whose own troops have recently arrived in country for patrol duties. The guess around the Pentagon is that Bremer's role in postwar reconstruction will probably be scaled back, if not suspended, at least until the war is really over.

The New York Times quote needs to be placed in the complete context:

"We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy in the heartland of the country where we continue to face former regime loyalists, criminals and foreign terrorists, who are trying to isolate the coalition forces from the Iraqi people and break the will of the international community," General Sanchez told a heavily guarded news conference in the Iraqi capital. He added, "They will fail." [paragraphs snipped]

In response to questions, he added, "What we are embarking on here is the absolute necessity to defeat the enemy," in pursuit of which the "application of all combat power that is available to us" would be used.

Interestingly, five days ago, a peace list I'm on included a post called Rumblings of a Surprise US Air Attack. The information came from the Scottish Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, which apparently has "peace watchers" that monitor US Air Force Bases (Fairford and Welford) in the UK:

Since Saturday, November 1, people in the Highlands of Scotland have been witnessing large movements of US warplanes overhead. Experienced observers say the large numbers are reminiscent of those that preceded the bombing of Iraq in 1998 and military strikes on Libya in the 1980's, as well as the first Gulf War.

At the weekend, warplanes were flying over at a rate of roughly one every 15 minutes. In addition to watching them from the ground, the plane spotters have also been able to overhear pilots talking by listening to their radio
frequencies.

At this rate, some 288 warplanes would have passed over Scotland in three days.

It is thought that the planes have flown on a route from the US over the north pole to bases in Europe and the Mediterranean. The size and scale of the movement suggests that the US may be preparing to strike at a country in the Middle East in the next week or ten days.

The Gulf War, of course, was a much larger operation than the '98 bombings or the Libyan bombings, so it's hard to gauge what's about to happen.

But it certainly looks as if the US is about to prove that it is still at war in Iraq.