From the NY Times:
A Price Too High
By BOB HERBERT

How long is it going to take for us to recognize that the war we so foolishly started in Iraq is a fiasco — tragic, deeply dehumanizing and ultimately unwinnable? How much time and how much money and how many wasted lives is it going to take?

At the United Nations yesterday, grieving diplomats spoke bitterly, but not for attribution, about the U.S.-led invasion and occupation. They said it has not only resulted in the violent deaths of close and highly respected colleagues, but has also galvanized the most radical elements of Islam.

"This is a dream for the jihad," said one high-ranking U.N. official. "The resistance will only grow. The American occupation is now the focal point, drawing people from all over Islam into an eye-to-eye confrontation with the hated Americans.

"It is very propitious for the terrorists," he said. "The U.S. is now on the soil of an Arab country, a Muslim country, where the terrorists have all the advantages. They are fighting in a terrain which they know and the U.S. does not know, with cultural images the U.S. does not understand, and with a language the American soldiers do not speak. The troops can't even read the street signs."

The American people still do not have a clear understanding of why we are in Iraq. And the troops don't have a clear understanding of their mission. We're fighting a guerrilla war, which the bright lights at the Pentagon never saw coming, with conventional forces.

Under these circumstances, in which the enemy might be anybody, anywhere, tragedies like the killing of Mazen Dana are all but inevitable. Mr. Dana was the veteran Reuters cameraman who was blown away by jittery U.S. troops on Sunday. The troops apparently thought his video camera was a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

The mind plays tricks on you when you're in great danger. A couple of weeks ago, in an apparent case of mistaken identity, U.S. soldiers killed two members of the Iraqi police. And a number of innocent Iraqi civilians, including children, have been killed by American troops.

The carnage from riots, ambushes, firefights, suicide bombings, acts of sabotage, friendly fire incidents and other deadly encounters is growing. And so is the hostility toward U.S. troops and Americans in general.

We are paying a terribly high price — for what?

One of the many reasons Vietnam spiraled out of control was the fact that America's top political leaders never clearly defined the mission there, and were never straight with the public about what they were doing. Domestic political considerations led Kennedy, then Johnson, then Nixon to conceal the truth about a policy that was bankrupt from the beginning. They even concealed how much the war was costing.

Sound familiar?

Now we're lodged in Iraq, in the midst of the most volatile region of the world, and the illusion of a quick victory followed by grateful Iraqis' welcoming us with open arms has vanished. Instead of democracy blossoming in the desert, we have the reality of continuing bloodshed and heightened terror — the payoff of a policy spun from fantasies and lies.

Senator John McCain and others are saying the answer is more troops, an escalation. If you want more American blood shed, that's the way to go. We sent troops to Vietnam by the hundreds of thousands. There were never enough.

Beefing up the American occupation is not the answer to the problem. The American occupation is the problem. The occupation is perceived by ordinary Iraqis as a confrontation and a humiliation, and by terrorists and other bad actors as an opportunity to be gleefully exploited.

The U.S. cannot bully its way to victory in Iraq. It needs allies, and it needs a plan. As quickly as possible, we should turn the country over to a genuine international coalition, headed by the U.N. and supported in good faith by the U.S.

The idea would be to mount a massive international effort to secure Iraq, develop a legitimate sovereign government and work cooperatively with the Iraqi people to rebuild the nation.

If this does not happen, disaster will loom because the United States cannot secure and rebuild Iraq on its own.

A U.N. aide told me: "The United States is the No. 1 enemy of the Muslim world, and right now it's sitting on the terrorists' doorstep. It needs help. It needs friends."

From michaelmoore.com:
I Never Promised You a Ruse Garden -- A Letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush
June 26, 2003
Dear Lt. George W. Bush,

I hope you don't mind me referring to you by the only true military rank you ever achieved, that being the one from your on-again, off-again "days" in the, um, Texas Air National Guard. Ever since I saw you in that flyboy outfit, landing on that ship, I assumed you now wanted to be addressed by your military title, as opposed to the civilian rank imposed on you by your dad's friends.

So, Lieutenant, I was wondering, would you do me a favor?

Could you PLEASE do better than a ROSE BUSH?

I saw the guy on TV yesterday that your boys found, the Iraqi who said he had "planted" some nuclear plans in his "back yard" in Baghdad -- 12 years ago -- "under a rose bush."

Woo boy. That's a good one. Do you really think we are as dumb as we look? I know our fascination with "American Idol" and Scott Peterson may make us Americans look a little light in the head, but when it comes to lying to us to lead us into war, we really do demand a bit more of an EFFORT and a FOLLOW-THROUGH.

You see, George, it's not the lying and the doctoring of intelligence that has me all upset. It's that you've had control of Iraq for over two months now -- and you couldn't even find the time to plant just a few nukes or vats of nerve gas and at least make it LOOK like you weren't lying to us.

You see, by not faking some evidence of weapons of mass destruction, it shows that you thought no one would mind if it turned out you made everything up. A different kind of president, who believes that the American public would be outraged if they ever found out the truth, would go to great lengths to cover up his subterfuge.

Johnson did it with the Gulf of Tonkin. He said our ships were "attacked" by the North Vietnamese. They weren't, but he knew he had to at least make it LOOK like it happened. Nixon said he wasn't "a crook," but he knew that wasn't enough, so he paid hush money to the burglars and somehow had 18 1/2 minutes erased from a tape in the Oval Office. Why did he do this? Because he knew the American people would be pissed if they found out the truth.

Your blatant refusal to back up your verbal deception with the kind of fake evidence we have become used to is a slap in our collective American face. It's as if you are saying, "These Americans are so damn apathetic and lazy, we won't have to produce any weapons to back up our claims!" If you had just dug a few silo holes in the last month outside Tikrit, or spread some anthrax around those Winnebagos near Basra, or "discovered" some plutonium with that stash of home movies of Uday Hussein feeding his tigers, then it would have said to us that you thought we might revolt if you were caught in a lie. It would have shown us some *respect*. We honestly wouldn't have cared if it later came out that you planted all the WMD -- sure, we'd be properly peeved, but at least we would have been proud to know that you knew you HAD to back up your phony claims with the real deal!

I guess you finally figured that out this week. It started to appear that millions of us were calling you on your bluff -- those "fictitious reasons for the fictitious war." So you quickly produced this man and his rose bush and some 12-year old piece of paper and some metal parts. CNN broke in at 5:15pm and screamed they had the exclusive! "IRAQI NUCLEAR PLANS FOUND!" But a few good reporters started asking some hard questions -- and, barely 3 hours later, your own administration was forced to admit the plans were "not the smoking gun” proving that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Oops.

Never a good idea to rely on a bush, Lieutenant.

Yours,

Michael Moore

www.michaelmoore.com

PS. Sorry, I still can't get that padded flyboy suit out of my head. I know, I need help. But when you landed on that carrier, and that banner read, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED," just what mission was that that was accomplished? 'Cause by my count, more than 50 of our young soldiers have died since you said the mission was accomplished. Anarchy still reigns, the Brits are losing kids, too, and wacko fundamentalists now seem to ready to rule the land. Women are already being told to cover their face and shut their mouths, store owners who sell liquor have been executed, and movie theaters showing "immoral" Hollywood movies have been forced to shut down. And hey, this isn't even west Texas! Maybe you could get back into that jumpsuit, fly over to Baghdad and land at the former Saddam International Airport, jump out and give one of those big happy waves -- under a sign that reads, "MISSION IMPOSSIBLE."

From the NY Times:
No Work, No Homes
By BOB HERBERT

Talk about preaching to the choir. President Bush and his clueless team of economic advisers held a summit at the president's ranch in Crawford, Tex., yesterday. This is the ferociously irresponsible crowd that has turned its back on simple arithmetic and thinks the answer to every economic question is a gigantic tax cut for the rich.

Their voodoo fantasies were safe in Crawford. There was no one at the ranch to chastise them for bequeathing backbreaking budget deficits to generations yet unborn. And no one was there to confront them with evidence of the intense suffering that so many poor, working-class and middle-class families are experiencing right now because of job losses on Mr. Bush's watch.

After the meeting, Mr. Bush said, "This administration is optimistic about job creation."

It's too bad George Akerlof wasn't at the meeting. Mr. Akerlof, a 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, bluntly declared on Tuesday that "the Bush fiscal policy is the worst policy in the last 200 years." Speaking at a press conference arranged by the Economic Policy Institute, Mr. Akerlof, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said, "Within 10 years, we're going to pay a serious price for such irresponsibility."

Also participating in the institute's press conference was Robert Solow, an economist and professor emeritus at M.I.T. who is also a Nobel laureate. He assailed the Bush tax cuts as "redistributive in intent and redistributive in effect."

"There has been a dissipation of the huge budget surplus," he said, "and all we have to show for that is the city of Baghdad."

The president and his advisers could have learned something about the real world if, instead of hanging out at the ranch, they had visited a city like Los Angeles (or almost any other hard-hit American venue) and spent time talking to folks who have been thrown out of work and, in some cases, out of their homes in this treacherous Bush economy.

The job market in California worsened in July. More than a million people are out of work statewide, and there are few signs of the optimism that Mr. Bush is feeling.

Officials at homeless shelters in Los Angeles, as in other large American cities, are seeing big increases in the number of families seeking shelter because of extended periods of joblessness. The pattern is as depressing as it is familiar: the savings run out, the rent doesn't get paid, the eviction notice arrives.

Tanya Tull, president of Beyond Shelter in downtown L.A., said the percentage of families in her facility had climbed from about one-third to more than half because of the employment crisis. The breadwinners can't find jobs, she said, "so they're losing their housing."

Ralph Plumb, president of the Union Rescue Mission on L.A.'s skid row, said his agency, traditionally a haven for homeless men with drug and alcohol problems, is providing shelter for more and more "intact" families. Their problems are not the result of drug or alcohol abuse, or mental impairment. They simply have no money. Forty percent of the people at the mission are there "purely due to economic issues," he said.

Ms. Tull and Mr. Plumb both said an important factor in the rise of homeless families had been the "reform" of the welfare system. Destitution is the next stop for people who can't find jobs and can't get welfare.

One of the families at the Union Rescue Mission was featured this week in a front-page article in USA Today. William Kamstra, who earned $40,000 a year before losing his job, looks for work each day while his wife, Sue, and their three children spend the day at a library. They sleep at the mission.

"Homelessness in major cities is escalating," the article said, "as more laid-off workers already living paycheck to paycheck wind up on the streets or in shelters."

That story ran one day after a front-page Wall Street Journal article that spelled out how sweet just one of the Bush tax cuts has been for those in the upper brackets: "The federal tax cut, which slashed the tax rate on dividends and prompted many companies to increase their payouts, is proving to be a boon for some corporate executives who are reaping millions in after-tax gains."

Some people have reason to be optimistic. It's the best of times, or the worst of times. Depending on your perspective.

From the NY TImes:
Thanks for the M.R.E.'s
By PAUL KRUGMAN

A few days ago I talked to a soldier just back from Iraq. He'd been in a relatively calm area; his main complaint was about food. Four months after the fall of Baghdad, his unit was still eating the dreaded M.R.E.'s: meals ready to eat. When Italian troops moved into the area, their food was "way more realistic" — and American troops were soon trading whatever they could for some of that Italian food.

Other stories are far worse. Letters published in Stars and Stripes and e-mail published on the Web site of Col. David Hackworth (a decorated veteran and Pentagon critic) describe shortages of water. One writer reported that in his unit, "each soldier is limited to two 1.5-liter bottles a day," and that inadequate water rations were leading to "heat casualties." An American soldier died of heat stroke on Saturday; are poor supply and living conditions one reason why U.S. troops in Iraq are suffering such a high rate of noncombat deaths?

The U.S. military has always had superb logistics. What happened? The answer is a mix of penny-pinching and privatization — which makes our soldiers' discomfort a symptom of something more general.

Colonel Hackworth blames "dilettantes in the Pentagon" who "thought they could run a war and an occupation on the cheap." But the cheapness isn't restricted to Iraq. In general, the "support our troops" crowd draws the line when that support might actually cost something.

The usually conservative Army Times has run blistering editorials on this subject. Its June 30 blast, titled "Nothing but Lip Service," begins: "In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap — and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately." The article goes on to detail a series of promises broken and benefits cut.

Military corner-cutting is part of a broader picture of penny-wise-pound-foolish government. When it comes to tax cuts or subsidies to powerful interest groups, money is no object. But elsewhere, including homeland security, small-government ideology reigns. The Bush administration has been unwilling to spend enough on any aspect of homeland security, whether it's providing firefighters and police officers with radios or protecting the nation's ports. The decision to pull air marshals off some flights to save on hotel bills — reversed when the public heard about it — was simply a sound-bite-worthy example. (Air marshals have told MSNBC.com that a "witch hunt" is now under way at the Transportation Security Administration, and that those who reveal cost-cutting measures to the media are being threatened with the Patriot Act.)

There's also another element in the Iraq logistical snafu: privatization. The U.S. military has shifted many tasks traditionally performed by soldiers into the hands of such private contractors as Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary. The Iraq war and its aftermath gave this privatized system its first major test in combat — and the system failed.

According to the Newhouse News Service, "U.S. troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by the Army for logistics support failed to show up." Not surprisingly, civilian contractors — and their insurance companies — get spooked by war zones. The Financial Times reports that the dismal performance of contractors in Iraq has raised strong concerns about what would happen in a war against a serious opponent, like North Korea.

Military privatization, like military penny-pinching, is part of a pattern. Both for ideological reasons and, one suspects, because of the patronage involved, the people now running the country seem determined to have public services provided by private corporations, no matter what the circumstances. For example, you may recall that in the weeks after 9/11 the Bush administration and its Congressional allies fought tooth and nail to leave airport screening in the hands of private security companies, giving in only in the face of overwhelming public pressure. In Iraq, reports The Baltimore Sun, "the Bush administration continues to use American corporations to perform work that United Nations agencies and nonprofit aid groups can do more cheaply."

In short, the logistical mess in Iraq isn't an isolated case of poor planning and mismanagement: it's telling us what's wrong with our current philosophy of government.

Bush: "We also appreciate the military families who share in the hardship and uncertainties of this essential mission."

Fact: Bush's 2004 Budget Would Hurt Military Families. Bush's budget for 2004 proposed several cuts that would be directly harmful to military families. Bush would cut $200 million in funding to public schools on military bases -- children with parents serving in Iraq would be disproportionately hit. Bush proposed a massive $14 billion cut over ten years in veterans benefits. His most recent tax package excluded 260,000 children with parents on active military duty in the expanded child tax credit. Bush would cut from $10.7 billion to $9.2 billion a program for military housing, and require larger enrollment fees for prescription drug coverage. [House Appropriations Committee Minority Staff, 6/16/03; Washington Post, 6/17/03; Children's Defense Fund Fact Sheet, 6/5/03, http://www.childrensdefense.org]

From the NY Times:
Everything Is Political
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The agency's analysts find that they are no longer helping to formulate policy; instead, their job is to rationalize decisions that have already been made. And more and more, they find that they are expected to play up evidence, however weak, that seems to support the administration's case, while suppressing evidence that doesn't.

Am I describing the C.I.A.? The E.P.A.? The National Institutes of Health? Actually, I'm talking about the Treasury Department, but the ambiguity is no coincidence. Across the board, the Bush administration has politicized policy analysis. Whether the subject is stem cells or global warming, budget deficits or weapons of mass destruction, government agencies are under intense pressure to say what the White House wants to hear. And the long-term consequences are likely to be dire.

Traditionally the Treasury, like the C.I.A., stands somewhat above the political fray. Externally, it is supposed to provide objective data that Congress and the public can use to evaluate administration proposals. Internally, long-serving Treasury analysts traditionally ride herd on political appointees, warning them when their proposals are ill conceived or irresponsible.

But under the Bush administration the Treasury takes its marching orders from White House political operatives. As The New Republic points out, when John Snow meets with Karl Rove, the meetings take place in Mr. Rove's office.

To the general public, the most obvious consequence of this subservience has been Treasury's meek acquiescence in an economic policy that hasn't produced any jobs, but has produced a $450 billion deficit. Insiders, however, are if anything even more dismayed by the erosion of Treasury's intellectual integrity — an erosion exemplified by its denial and deception on the subject of tax cuts.

Here's the story: Treasury has an elaborate computer model designed to evaluate who benefits and who loses from any proposed change in tax laws. For example, the model can be used to estimate how much families in the middle of the income distribution will gain from a tax cut, or the share of that tax cut that goes to the top 1 percent of families. In the 1990's the results of such analyses were routinely made public.

But since George W. Bush came into power, the department has suppressed most of that information, releasing only partial, misleading tables. The purpose of this suppression, of course, is to conceal the extent to which Mr. Bush's tax cuts concentrate their bounty on families with very high incomes. In a stinging recent article in Tax Notes, the veteran tax analyst Martin Sullivan writes of the debate over the 2001 cut that "Treasury's analysis was so embarrassingly poor and so biased, we thought we had seen the last of its kind." But worse was to come.

For his June 22 interview with Howard Dean, Tim Russert asked the Treasury Department to prepare examples showing how repealing the Bush tax cuts would affect ordinary families. Presumably Mr. Russert thought Treasury would provide a representative selection — that is, like many in the media, he doesn't yet understand the extent to which Treasury has become an arm of the White House political machine.

In any case, the examples Treasury provided to Mr. Russert and others in the media were wildly unrepresentative. To give you a sense: the Treasury's example of a "lower income" elderly household was one receiving $2,000 a year in dividend income. In fact, only about one elderly household in four receives any dividend income, and only one in eight receives as much as $2,000. Not surprisingly, the "Russert families" gained far more from the Bush tax cuts than a representative sample. As Mr. Sullivan put it, "If this continues, the Treasury's Office of Tax Policy may have to change its name to the Office of Tax Propaganda."

As I've said, this is only one example of a broad pattern. Still, why does politicized analysis matter? One answer is that it undermines democracy: how can Congress or the public make informed votes if both are fed distorted information?

And even if you aren't bothered by an administration that systematically misleads the public, you ought to be worried about the decisions of an administration that systematically misleads itself. A leader who is told only what he wants to hear is all too likely to make bad decisions about the economy, the environment and beyond.