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Full Disclosure

The Texas Democrats still aren't coming home to the range, while the Ten Commandments have been chipped and shipped from the Alabama Judicial Center and Fox News even has dumped its suit against Al Franken. So even as the liberals celebrate three more points it would seem this week, there's no denying that Iraq and its discontents are still on the majority of people's minds. How so? Well consider this ominous piece from the Washington Post.

After all, the majority of people without backgrounds in international relations claim that every act the US does in the Middle East has something to do with oil. Western Republicans are eager to think about the possibility of getting exclusive rights in Iraq's supposedly huge cahce of black gold underneath the ground. Apparently, men like Vice President Cheney whet their appetite by telling them just how much they would stand to gain if they got on board the war effort. Remember too that oil companies often operate in dangerous or tumultous regimes, and had OPEC stung the US, many of the petroleum firms would be feeling it. But maybe there's something to be said about it not being about oil. Maybe the concern is that the US military is hobbled by another GOP world goal. In effect, the GOP wants to contract the size of the federal bureaucracy.

Don't laugh, however: the US Armed Forces is the biggest bureaucracy of them all. So Cheney's boys at Halliburton provide an exit, a way to expand the role of the military without relying on more civil servants. The only problem is that the article indicates many of KBR's snafus have cost us in a tangible way. As my congressman Waxman points out, even having to pay insurance premiums is padding the Iraq war bill. Of course, the White House is leaking through the State Department news that it would like more Muslim nations to participate militarily under the US flag. Well that's a neat idea, but quite frankly this is an American-made mess and now the Europeans and Arabs are ready to let Bush hang himself. What's worse...no weapons of mass destruction appear to be in the offing and the longer the petroleum infrastructure is dead the less we can assume that Iraq will begin to pay for itself. But Iraq isn't Vietnam. Vietnam was a proxy war against a Soviet-backed regime. Iraq is nothing more than an attempt to use the sword to strike at the heart of the leverage the Arab-Islamic world has developed over the West in terms of natural resources, Israel-Palestinean relations, and the notion of terrorism. So far the oil problem is still acute, the Colin Powell induced "roadmap" has Abu Mazen asking direction, and by all accounts, Islamic fundamentalists are ramping up attacks outside the US.

And all of this brings us back to Halliburton. They can't carry the sword as soldiers and can't deliver the destruction required to qualify as "victory." In other words, unless Bush and the Carlyle Groups of the world assent to privitizing the army itself the problem will still stand. The budget deficit and current problems aren't caused by school lunches or tax cuts or the stock market. It's that no matter how you try to avoid it, the military is the greatest expense that a national government carries and that no amount of "downsizing" will provide you with the outcome you desire. Just as Ronald Reagen learned in the 1980s...you cannot be a libertarian and an imperialist. In fact, the nation state arose from the need for national armies and permanent taxation. Abraham Lincoln invoked the federal income tax to keep the Union Army afloat during the Civil War. The National Militia have been reorganized in the US into the National Guard. And it doesn't matter what ideas you suggest...Bush won't have them. He won't hire more troops, he won't touch the draft, he refuses to extend benefits for retired and incapacitated personnel. In short, we have an army that has too few people to do the job, and an attitude toward taxation as if wars are paid on credit card. No matter how sophisticated the US military becomes in techonology and training, the system still requires a huge amount of money and it has to be something Grover Norquist can't drown in a bathtub.
posted by Thomas at 10:58 PM 0 comments