It's Still the War(s), Stupid!

We are coming up on the five year anniversary of the occupation of Iraq, a country we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, had no weapons of mass destruction, and was not seeking yellow cake uranium from Africa. Back when this illegal and immoral war was started a member of the Bush administration, Lawrence Lindsey, speculated that the conflict would cost 100 billion to 200 billion dollars and was ridiculed and subsequently fired for saying such a thing. We now are looking at a tab of close to a trillion dollars spent so far with a projected total bill for this war and the war in Afghanistan coming in at over three trillion dollars by the time it is all said and done. In the process of spending this obscene amount of money, we have lost nearly 4000 American troops, have ruined the lives of thousands more whose war wounds will never heal, who will never be able to regain the lives they once lead. Not to mention the Iraqis who have died, been displaced, wounded, and are living as refugees in conditions far worse than their pre-invasion situations. This entire fiasco rests heavily on the shoulders of Bush and Cheney who were the masterminds, organizers and cheerleaders for this debacle. Bush insisted on surging when we should have begun to pull out, Cheney sent in Halliburton and KBR to do the things that even desensitized soldiers would not do. They both together are responsible for the worst foreign policy disaster in which the United States has ever been involved. We still have not captured Osama Bin Laden, the situation in Pakistan is a mess, and Afghanistan is breeding more Taliban fighters than were there when we first invaded that country. All in all, nice job, Bush. We are more hated around the world, there is less respect for American foreign policy, our allies (?) are abandoning the fight against terrorism in which we are supposedly engaged. Thanks loads, George.

This is all to say that we must end the wars if we want to begin to heal our international reputation, and we must make diplomacy our goal rather than aggressive attacks on other countries. Ending our involvement in wars/occupations abroad will have the added benefit of allowing us the funds to address some of our most egregious needs here at home. The mortgage and now growing credit crises are no doubt the result of deregulation and privatization of which the Bush administration is so fond. Paul Krugman, an economist, explained the impact of laissez-faire capitalism much better than I ever could in a recent NYTimes column (Betting the Bank).

War with Iraq - Costs, Consequences and Alternatives, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. A December 2002 report, published under the auspices of the Academy’s Committee on International Security Studies (CISS), finds that the political, military, and economic consequences of war with Iraq could be extremely costly to the United States. William D. Nordhaus (Yale University) estimates the economic costs of war with Iraq in scenarios that are both favorable and unfavorable to the United States. Steven E. Miller (Harvard University) considers a number of potentially disastrous military and strategic outcomes of war for the United States that have received scant public attention. Carl Kaysen (MIT), John D. Steinbruner (University of Maryland),and Martin B. Malin (American Academy) examine the broader national security strategy behind the move toward a preventive war against Iraq.

Blood for Oil (a great web site that has all kinds of graphics that you can download that will piss off the current administration!)

Check out Deja Vu All Over Again - an analysis of the scary news that the resignation of Admiral Fallon portends as far as an imminent attack on Iran, an excellent post that can be found over on the FourFreedoms blog.

A Crude Case For War? (Washington Post, March 16, 2008)

On Being Yourself

I guess last Tuesday the voters of Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island woke up, poked their little pea heads out of the ground and saw their shadows, so that means we will have six more weeks of Hillary Clinton ;(

Hillary Clinton just won't go away. I am not really astounded that she would risk the very end she claims so badly to want (a Democratic victory in November) just to realize a very personal and increasingly selfish dream.

"I yam what I yam." said Popeye.

A few days ago I read an article in the NYTimes that revealed another memoir writer as a fraud. "In 'Love and Consequences,' a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true." It turns out that Margaret B. Jones (real name Margaret Seltzer) is not half Native, did not grow up on the mean streets of South-Central Los Angeles and was not a foster child raised by an African American woman known as "Big Mom." Rather Margaret was a white girl who grew up privileged in Sherman Oaks, California, reared by her biological family and attended a private Episcopal Day School from which she graduated in the early 1990s.

Ms. Seltzer it turns out follows in a long line of other infamous writers who decided that faux truth would sell better than real fiction and penned memoirs that were more imaginary than factual. Among the most well-known are James Frey author of "A Million Little Pieces" who was publicly humiliated on Oprah's show, less well-known, but more egregious is the author Nasdijj, who fabricated out of whole cloth a miserable, abusive boyhood in migrant farm camps. Nasdijj (later revealed to be a white man named Timothy Patrick Barrus) portrayed himself as a half-Navajo who went on to adopt a son who suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, in a subsequent memoir Mr. Barrus told how he adopted a boy with AIDS, how he and his adopted son lived on the edge, and how he tried to keep his son from experiencing pain by injecting him with heroin. It was all lies, complete and utter falsehoods, stories that may have sold as passable fiction had the authors had any ethics or honesty, but instead were passed off as life stories, real experiences, which no doubt loaned them some compelling credibility and increased their audiences.

As any publisher knows, a real-life gruesome tale beats a fictitious tale of life's travails any day of the week. We like stories about underdogs who have overcome great odds, stories of those who have been dealt a lousy hand, but played it well, and done right not just by their own measure, but who have helped others, if only by example. That is perhaps why these writers get published, but also why they are ultimately exposed as the frauds they are. Their stories are too rich in detail, too gruesome, too difficult to believe that anyone could have survived such horrors and lived to tell about it.

What these fraudulent writers do is marginalize and make suspect every story that is true, every word that is penned by a true survivor. They mock lives that are lived in spite of incredible odds against them, and they make us question every claim made in every memoir that we read.