Suckered Again: Abandonment of Vets is a Military Tradition

The surprise is that anyone is surprised. Every generation of warriors has marched off to war based on the pledge that they would be taken care of no matter what. America has broken that promise every time.

Abandoning men who lose their limbs and sanity in battle is a tradition that goes back to America’s first war.

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Don’t Americans who risk their lives to serve in the military deserve the same consideration as those who smoke cigarettes? Military propaganda — television commercials, posters, video games and recruitment offices, Fox News — ought to be plastered with a large, bold-faced notice:

WARNING: Military Service Causes Death, Mutilation, Poverty, Homelessness, and Complicated Feelings of Having Been Suckered

Ted Rall | Ted Rall.com 

March 15th, 2007 || PermaLink

The Pragmatism of Prolonged War

Deferring to the Democratic leadership means endorsing loopholes that leave the door wide open for continued U.S. military actions inside Iraq — whether justified as attacks on fighters designated as Al Qaeda in Iraq, or with reclassification of U.S. forces as “trainers” rather than “combat troops.” And an escalating U.S. air war could continue to bomb Iraqi neighborhoods for years.

The position being articulated by Reps. Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey and others in Congress is the one that the antiwar movement should unite behind — to fully fund bringing the troops home in a safe and orderly way, while ending the entire U.S. occupation and war effort, by the end of 2007.

We’re urged to take solace from the fact that Washington’s debate has shifted to “when” — rather than “whether” — the war should end. But the end of the U.S. war effort could be deferred for many more years while debates over “when” flourish and fester. This happened during the Vietnam War, year after year, while death came to tens of thousands more American soldiers and perhaps a million more Vietnamese people.

Pelosi is speaker of the House, and Reid is majority leader of the Senate. But neither speaks for, much less leads, the antiwar movement that we need.

When you look at the practicalities of the situation, Pelosi and Reid could be more accurately described as speaker and leader for the war-management movement.

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams.org 

March 14th, 2007 || PermaLink

Iraq: the hidden cost of the war

America won’t simply be paying with its dead. The Pentagon is trying to silence economists who predict that several decades of care for the wounded will amount to an unbelievable $2.5 trillion.

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It is sobering to think how the money going down the drain in Iraq could otherwise have been spent. “For this amount of money, we could have provided health insurance for the uninsured of this country,” Bilmes tells me. “We could have made social security solvent for the next three generations, and implemented all the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations [to tighten domestic security].”

hat kind of list goes on: the annual cost of treating all heart disease and diabetes in the United States would amount to a quarter of what the Iraq war is costing. Pre-school for every child in America would take just $35bn a year. In their main paper, Bilmes and Stiglitz come up with an even more intriguing possibility: “We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might have succeeded in winning hearts and minds.”

What a historic triumph that would have been for Bush. Instead, his legacy to generations of Americans will be a needless debt of at least $2.5trn, what his own defence secretary describes as a four-way civil war in Iraq, dangerous instability in the Middle East, and increasingly entrenched hatred of the United States throughout the world. Alas, we are likely to hear the daily roar of those C-17s as they approach Andrews Air Force Base for years to come.

Andrew Stephen | New Statesman 

March 13th, 2007 || PermaLink

The Army is ordering injured troops to go to Iraq

A copy of Jenkins’ profile written after that Feb. 15 meeting and signed by Capt. Starbuck, the brigade surgeon, shows a healthier soldier than the profile of Jenkins written by another doctor just late last year, though Jenkins says his condition is unchanged. Other soldiers’ documents show the same pattern.

One female soldier with psychiatric issues and a spine problem has been in the Army for nearly 20 years. “My [health] is deteriorating,” she said over dinner at a restaurant near Fort Benning. “My spine is separating. I can’t carry gear.” Her medical records include the note “unable to deploy overseas.” Her status was also reviewed on Feb. 15. And she has been ordered to Iraq this week.

Mark Benjamin | Salon 

March 12th, 2007 || PermaLink

A Predator Becomes More Dangerous When Wounded

The US invasion of Iraq virtually instructed Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent. The message was that the US attacks at will, as long as the target is defenceless. Now Iran is ringed by US forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and the Persian Gulf, and close by are nuclear-armed Pakistan and Israel, the regional superpower, thanks to US support.

In 2003, Iran offered negotiations on all outstanding issues, including nuclear policies and Israel-Palestine relations. Washington’s response was to censure the Swiss diplomat who brought the offer.

Noam Chomsky | Guardian/UK 

March 10th, 2007 || PermaLink

No, Capitalism is Not the Only Way to Order Human Affairs

For a start, socialism makes possible the re-establishment of democracy whether at national, multinational or global level. Capitalist globalisation has become synonymous with democratic powerlessness as all important decisions are taken further away from the people affected and concentrated in the hands of ever fewer corporate bosses, private equity and publicly traded alike, for whom the common weal cannot be their priority. It also raises the prospect of a more peaceful world. The idea that unchallenged capitalism meant universal peace - quite popular in the early 1990s - hardly takes much debunking now. A system that replaced fighting for scarce resources with the global management of them offers the chance both of sparing lives and of the decisive action necessary to save the planet.

Andrew Murray |Guardian / UK 

March 9th, 2007 || PermaLink

The United States’ Nuclear Hypocrisy

As the United States surges forward in its nuclear renaissance, the threat of nuclear terrorism and accidental nuclear strikes remains a grave yet under-funded priority. The administration occasionally raises the specter of nuclear-armed terrorists. In February 2004, for example, President Bush warned, “In the hands of terrorists, weapons of mass destruction would be a first resort.”

Despite its rhetoric, however, the administration has done nothing to accelerate efforts to destroy and safeguard loose nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials, allocating about $1 billion a year to these crucial non-proliferation efforts (roughly the same amount that the Bush administration has been burning through each day in Iraq). At this rate, it will be 13 years before Russian nuclear material is secured.

The contradictions between what the administration is demanding of Tehran and other powers, and the capabilities it is pursuing for its own arsenal, are provocative and dangerous — a pernicious form of nuclear hypocrisy.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/48890/

March 8th, 2007 || PermaLink