Almost every time you turn on the television, somebody’s carrying on about the projected trillion-dollar cost of Democratic health-insurance reforms — derived by multiplying the $100 billion yearly cost by 10, and often by ignoring the projected $11 billion yearly savings to the U.S. budget deficit.

Pentagon spending this year alone, however, columnist David Sirota points out, is projected at $673 billion, for a 10-year total of $6.73 trillion. That’s assuming costs don’t rise. (Fat chance.) Giving McChrystal the soldiers he wants, along with training and equipping an Afghan army of dubious loyalty, is projected to cost an additional $40 billion to $50 billion each year. Yet nobody’s supposed to ask how anything that happens in that remote land could possibly justify the costs.

Gene Lyons | Salon

President Obama and Congress will soon make defining choices about health care and troops for Afghanistan.

These two choices have something in common – each has a bill of around $100 billion per year. So one question is whether we’re better off spending that money blowing up things in Helmand Province or building up things in America.

Nicholas Kristof | The New York Times

The hero’s reception granted Gorbachev when he accompanied the German leader across the Bornholmer Street bridge to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the city’s division was credit long overdue. As The New York Times reported: “More than 1,000 people lined the bridge Monday night under gray skies and a steady drizzle to hear the chancellor speak, but their loudest cheers came when she thanked Mr. Gorbachev for the reforming attitude he brought to the Soviet leadership that helped make the events of that historic night possible.” The crowd, chanting “Gorby, Gorby, Gorby,” understood that he had done something unique for a world leader: He admitted the error of his system’s ways and radically reversed its course.

The surrender of immense political power, personal as well as international in scope, is something we never expect from leaders, but Gorbachev set a model of self-sacrifice for a larger purpose that one wishes others would follow. How rare in history for a leader of such great standing to surrender his position, along with its abundance of personal perquisites, for the larger common good. How unexpected for the leader of a military colossus to turn swords into plowshares.

Robert Scheer | TruthDig

The American military has been largely privatized, although Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has still recommended a 40,000-troop increase. The Army’s basic functions have been outsourced to no-bid contractors. What was once done by the military with concern for tactical and strategic advancement is done by war profiteers concerned solely about profit. The aims of the military and the contractors are in conflict. A scaling down of the war or a withdrawal is viewed by these corporations as bad for business. But expansion of the war, as many veterans will attest, is only making the situation more precarious.

“American and Afghan soldiers are putting their lives at risk, Afghan civilians are dying, and yet there’s this underlying system in place that gains more from keeping all of them in harm’s way rather than taking them out of it,” the officer complained. “If we bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, we may profit morally, we might make gains for humanity, but moral profits and human gains do not contribute to the bottom line. Peace and profit are ultimately contradictory forces at work in Afghanistan.”

Chris Hedges | TruthDig.com

Things are veering toward such extreme desperation that the US government might fall under the sway, by extra-electoral means, of an ambitious military officer, or a group of such, sometime in the near future. I’m not promoting a coup d’etat, you understand, but I am raising it as a realistic possibility as elected officials prove utterly unwilling to cope with a mounting crisis of capital and resources.

The ‘corn-pone Hitler’ scenario is still another possibility – Glen Beck and Sarah Palin vying for the hearts and minds of the morons who want ‘to keep gubmint out of Medicare!’ – but I suspect that there is a growing cadre of concerned officers around the Pentagon who will not brook that fucking nonsense for a Crystal City minute and, what’s more, would be very impatient to begin correcting the many fiascos currently blowing the nation apart from within.

Remember, today’s US military elite is battle-hardened after eight years of war in Asia. No doubt they love their country, as Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte loved theirs. It may pain them to stand by and watch it dissolve like a castle made of sugar in a winter gale.

I raise this possibility because no one else has, and I think we ought to be aware that all kinds of strange outcomes are possible in a society under severe stress. History is a harsh mistress. For all his ’star quality’ and likable personality, President Obama is increasingly perceived as impotent where the real ongoing disasters of public life are concerned, and he has made the tragic choice to appear to be hostage to the bankers who are systematically draining the life-blood from the middle class.

Whatever we are seeing on the S & P ticker these days does not register the agony of ordinary people losing everything they worked for and even believed in. In a leadership vacuum, centers don’t hold, things come apart, and rough beasts slouch toward Wall Street.

James Howard Kunstler | Clusterfuck Nation

How long are we going to continue to do this?  We invade and occupy a country, and then label as “insurgents” or even ”terrorists” the people in that country who fight against our invasion and occupation.  With the most circular logic imaginable, we then insist that we must remain in order to defeat the “insurgents” and “terrorists” — largely composed of people whose only cause for fighting is our presence in their country.  All the while, we clearly exacerbate the very problem we are allegedly attempting to address — Terrorism — by predictably and inevitably increasing anti-American anger and hatred through our occupation, which, no matter the strategy, inevitably entails our killing innocent civilians.

Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com

Violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is wrong. So is violence against people in Afghanistan and Iraq. But in the bizarre culture of identity politics, there are no alliances among the oppressed. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the first major federal civil rights law protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, passed last week, was attached to a $680-billion measure outlining the Pentagon’s budget, which includes $130 billion for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democratic majority in Congress, under the cover of protecting some innocents, authorized massive acts of violence against other innocents.

It was a clever piece of marketing. It blunted debate about new funding for war. And behind the closed doors of the caucus rooms, the Democratic leadership told Blue Dog Democrats, who are squeamish about defending gays or lesbians from hate crimes, that they could justify the vote as support for the war. They told liberal Democrats, who are squeamish about unlimited funding for war, that they could defend the vote as a step forward in the battle for civil rights. Gender equality groups, by selfishly narrowing their concern to themselves, participated in the dirty game.

………….

The brutality of Matthew Shepard’s killers, who beat him to death for being gay, is a product of a culture that glorifies violence and sadism. It is the product of a militarized culture. We have more police, prisons, inmates, spies, mercenaries, weapons and troops than any other nation on Earth. Our military, which swallows half of the federal budget, is enormously popular—as if it is not part of government. The military values of hyper-masculinity, blind obedience and violence are an electric current that run through reality television and trash-talk programs where contestants endure pain while they betray and manipulate those around them in a ruthless world of competition. Friendship and compassion are banished.

This hyper-masculinity is at the core of pornography with its fusion of violence and eroticism, as well as its physical and emotional degradation of women. It is an expression of the corporate state where human beings are reduced to commodities and companies have become proto-fascist enclaves devoted to maximziing profit. Militarism crushes the capacity for moral autonomy and difference. It isolates us from each other. It has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, our mentally ill, our unemployed, our sick, and yes, our gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual citizens.

Chris Hedges | TruthDig

So according to The Washington Post, dropping bombs on, controlling and occupying Afghanistan — all while simultaneously ensuring “effective governance, economic development, education, the elimination of corruption, the protection of womens rights” to Afghan citizens in Afghanistan — is an absolutely vital necessity that must be done no matter the cost.  But providing basic services such as health care to American citizens, in the U.S., is a secondary priority at best, something totally unnecessary that should wait for a few years or a couple decades until we can afford it and until our various wars are finished, if that ever happens.

“U.S. interests in South Asia” are paramount; U.S. interests in the welfare of those in American cities, suburbs and rural areas are an afterthought.As demented as that sounds, isnt that exactly the priority scheme weve adopted as a country?  Were a nation that couldnt even manage to get clean drinking water to our own citizens who were dying in the middle of New Orleans.  We have tens of thousands of people dying every year because they lack basic health care coverage.  The rich-poor gap continues to expand to third-world levels.  And The Post claims that war and “nation-building” in Afghanistan are crucial while health care for Americans is not because “wars, unlike entitlement programs, eventually come to an end.”

Except, as Andrew Bacevich points out, thats false:

Post-Vietnam, the officer corps was committed to the proposition that wars should be infrequent, that they should be fought only for the most vital interests, and that they should be fought in a way that would produce a quick and decisive outcome.What we have today in my judgment is just the inverse of that. War has become a permanent condition. –Andrew Bacevic

Beltway elites have health insurance and thus the costs and suffering for those who dont are abstract, distant and irrelevant.  Identically, with very rare exception, they and their families dont fight the wars they cheer on — and dont even pay for them — and thus get to enjoy all the pulsating benefits without any costs whatsoever.

Adam Smith, all the way back in 1776, in An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, described this Beltway attitude exactly:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . .

Lounging around in the editorial offices of the capital of a rapidly decaying empire, urging that more Americans be sent into endless war paid for with endless debt, while yawning and lazily waving away with boredom the hordes outside dying for lack of health care coverage, is one of the most repugnant images one can imagine.  Its exactly what Adam Smith denounced.  And its exactly what our political and media elite are.

Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com

Imagine if every American spent just a day contemplating how they’d react if some foreign army from a Muslim nation invaded and bombed the U.S., occupied the country for the next several years with 60,000 soldiers, killed tens of thousands of citizens here, set up secret prisons where they disappeared Americans for years without charges or even contact with the outside world, imposed sanctions that blockaded food and medicine and killed countless children, invaded and ransacked our homes at will, abducted Americans and shipped them halfway around the world to island-prisons, instituted a worldwide torture regime, armed their allies for attacks on other Western nations, and threatened still other invasions.

Do you think Americans might be seething with rage about that, wanting to kill as many of the people from that country as possible?  Wouldnt it be rather obvious that the more that was done to Americans, the more filled with hatred and a desire for violence they would be?

Just consider the rage and fury and burning desire for vengeance that was unleashed by a one-day attack on U.S. soil, eight years ago, by a stateless band of extremists, that killed 3,000 people.

Along those lines, a new poll from The Washington Post today reveals that 42% of Americans favor bombing Irans “nuclear development sites” 49% of Republicans; 38% Democrats; 42% Independents, while 33% of Americans favor “invading with U.S. forces to remove the Iranian government from power” 40% Republicans; 32% Democrats; 30% Independents.

Although majorities oppose that, that is a rather substantial group of Americans that favors having us bomb and invade our third Muslim country in less than ten years, not counting the places we bomb covertly or the countries bombed by our main Middle East client state.  And just imagine how much that support among Americans will increase if the U.S. Government ever starts advocating it and, therefore, the U.S. media even more loudly than now beats the drums of war against Iran. In the last ten years, the U.S. and Israel collectively have bombed at least six Muslim countries including Gaza.  Despite that, 40% of Americans want to attack yet another one, and 1/3 want to invade.

Those are the same people who, if there is another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, will be walking around, eyebrows earnestly raised, innocent, self-righteous and confused, and asking:  ”why do they hate us??”  And their friends and neighbors and leaders will assure them:  ”they hate us for our freedoms.”

Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com

I will confess that, while I have opposed the war in Afghanistan from the very beginning and think that a decision to escalate will destroy Obama’s presidency, I have worried that a withdrawal of American troops would make already harsh conditions much worse for Afghani women.

Then I read this report:

There is a schism among American feminist groups, where some — particularly Ms. Magazine and its parent group The Feminist Majority Foundation — support escalation in Afghanistan as a strategy for protecting women’s rights. But many other women — particularly activists like the women of CodePink, who have a long anti-war history — think that is a huge mistake and insist that most of the women in Afghanistan do not want more military, more war. It makes their lives even worse, if that is possible, while the discredited President Karzai, whose re-election seems fatally tainted by fraud and corruption and the warlords who control chunks of the countryside, shows little interest in supporting women’s rights — a recent law “explicitly legalizes marital rape as well as forcing women to dress and make themselves up (while in the home, of course) according to their husband’s demands, outlawing the ability to leave the home without a husband or a good reason to do so, and automatically granting custody of children to the male relatives (fathers or grandfathers),” according to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.

In a recent CodePink video interview, Afghan Parliament member Roshanak Wardak makes the position clear: “Most of the women do not want more troops — they need support to sustain their lives.” The CodePink delegation spoke with journalists, doctors, activists, NGOs, members of government and average Afghan women. The main message they heard is they “want the U.S. investment to reflect what is needed to bring peace. They need investment in the people of Afghanistan.”

“In truth, 90 percent of U.S. funding to Afghanistan is used for military; only approximately 10 percent has been used for any kind of development.” –Don Hazen, AlterNet

War-mongers will always develop persuasive arguments to justify their violence. All they ever deliver is more unnecessary death and squandered resources.

Michael Sky | ThinkingPeace