The Human Cost of War

Before I get into the news today, I want to bring up something that's been on my mind a lot in the past few days. We understand that there are currently 168,000 American troops serving in Iraq. Numbers like that have been bandied about for a while now, especially with all the recent discussion of the troop surge and how we're going to try to get those soldiers back out of Iraq. That's a huge number of human beings, many of whom are living every day with bombs going off around them.

But after I started really thinking about it, that number isn't the whole story. In the spring, we'll pass the fifth anniversary of the occupation of Iraq, and the 168,000 troops we have there now haven't been there the whole time. For all the talk about how the military is "stretched" and "strained," the specifics of that never really get laid out for us. How many people have served in the war in Iraq? Cox has an article from March (at the beginning of the surge) stating that there is no number solely for Iraq, but there is a joint number between Iraq and Afghanistan.

1,500,000.

According to suspicious source Wikipedia, "Approximately 1,426,713 personnel are currently on active duty in the military with an additional 1,259,000 personnel in the seven reserve components.

So what they mean, really, by "stretched," is that "there's a really shitty party in Iraq and everyone's invited."

I'm currently looking into getting updated statistics on how many troops have served and how many tours those soldiers have been on, but I just wanted to give you an idea of exactly what this war is costing in human currency: not in lives lost, but in lives scarred in battle, in husbands/wives/parents/children waiting at home and praying that their loved ones come home smiling and not dead or wounded, of upstanding citizens that could be safe at home with us instead of fighting tooth and nail in the desert for . . . [Editor's note: this sentence will be completed when someone gives us a satisfactory explanation of what this fight is about]. Since George W. Bush's presidency began, we have ONE AND A HALF MILLION NEW VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS. And no declaration of war.

P.S. -- "Furthermore: "About one in five of U.S. troops injured in Iraq have suffered serious wounds such as loss of a limb or an eye, massive burns, spinal or head damage or other potentially debilitating injury."

Hope

The Cubs can still win.

The Cubs still have a better chance of winning than the Republicans

• Screw you, David Broder!

  The Cubs are still struggling to recover. It's a miracle they're in the playoffs. I do not expect another miracle to follow.

  
  
  
• Jim Comey might be the only ethical person to have been employed at DoJ in the last seven years.
  
  
• Dobson and his goons have formally decided to back a third party if neither major party candidate is pro-life. I wonder if Giuliani will take a hit in the polls because of this . . .
  
  
• And we wonder why there's so much crap coming out of Hollywood.
  
  
• Larry Craig remains guilty of wanting sex. He also remains guilty of pissing off GOP leadership in grand fashion by refusing to resign, despite two previous promises that he would.
  
  
• Florida is suing the DNC and I couldn't be happier about it. For those just getting into this: Florida is trying to jump on the front-loading bandwagon by moving their primary up to January 29. In an attempt to stop the front-loading from getting completely ridiculous, the DNC decided to allow only four states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) to have their primary proceedings before February 5. Everyone else will lose delegates. Florida is claiming that this violates their voting rights. My personal feeling is that stripping delegates absolutely does violate their voting rights, that it does comprise "geographic discrimination." I would also propose that cherry-picking any four states that get to go ahead of everyone else also constitutes geographic discrimination, because those states basically get to choose the nominee, so all the primaries should just be held on the same day, some time in March or April. The jockeying for position here has gotten too ridiculous, and it's taking time and energy away from the the battles that really need to be fought.
  
  
• The nominees have been typecast: Barack Obama, the handsome and idealistic political wunderkind, is JFK, and Fred Thompson gets to be the prune-faced, Alzheimer's-afflicted not-actually-someone-who-is-fit-to-be-president-but-he-pretends-to-be-on-TV modern day Ronald Reagan.
  
  
• Remember how I suggested yesterday that Mike Huckabee might be the candidate for a fundamentalist third party? Well, that idea went down in flames real fast. Now I guess my money's on Brownback.
  

• Some people ask me why I love politics so much. Short answer: it's like comedy, but real, with higher stakes than any other game in the world.
  
  
• I think Hugo Chavez has dethroned Kim Jong Il in the "Hilariously Batshit Crazy Ruthless Dictator" category.
  
  
• LET IT GO. IT'S A BAD PUN. IT HAS NO RELEVANCE.
  
  
• A 10-year-old boy, on the subject of Condi Rice: “Her security might kill me if I ask one question or come two feet near her.”
  
  
• Math is fun.
  
  
• Faux pas! The chain of events:
  
  1. An Iraq War veteran speaks out against Rush's "phony soldier" comment.
  2. Rush explains that this veteran is like a suicide bomber, with the media "strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media and a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into."
  3. Iraq War veteran explains that the giant head wound you can see in his video is from an actual suicide bomber.
     
     
• Sometimes I feel like no one loathes Chuck Colson as much as I do. Thankfully, we have Sadly, No to point out that he's trying to claim the moral high ground by taking similar social stances to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
  
  
• When the Patriot Act came through, some of us said that it bypassed large and important parts of the constitution and could be used against innocent citizens at a whim with no one able to stop it. Some said the government would never do such a thing. Well, it turns out they did, and now there's a very exciting constitutional challenge.
  
  
• Sooner or later, I'm going to get really sick of listening to "Another One Bites the Dust." I'm sorry, Freddie, there's just too many senators retiring!
  
  
• Gullible children (with untreated ear infections performing acts of kindness on December 23 to make a last-minute good impression on Santa . . .
  
  
• See, socialized medicine isn't important.
  
  
• Rudy Giuliani makes baby Jesus cry.
  
  
• Important reminder! George W. Bush is still a dick!
  

• To follow up on Wyl's article from yesterday, a healthy majority of Americans, including 46% of Republicans, want Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and their people to pull the string on this war.
  
  
• Thankfully, David Obey appears willing to make sure that happens.
  
  
• Question: If the Christian Right breaks with the GOP over Giuliani, will one of the second-string Republican candidates jump ship with them in hopes of garnering a higher profile? I'm thinking Huckabee or Brownback.
  
  
• Putin to step down as president when his term is over, in order to become Prime Minister. Democracy prevails!
  
  
• The GOP can try to tout the low Congressional approval ratings as a sign of failure by the Democrats, but they're still wrong, and they're still going down in flames next year:

  "Despite discontent with Congress this year, the public rates congressional Republicans (29 percent approve) lower than congressional Democrats (38 percent approve). When the parties are pitted directly against each other, the public broadly favors Democrats on Iraq, health care, the federal budget and the economy. Only on the issue of terrorism are Republicans at parity with Democrats."

• Here's an interesting discussion of potential nominees (from both parties) for Secretary of State. It's easy for me to see Jim Webb as a Vice Presidential candidate and Bill Richardson getting the pushed into the cabinet (albeit a more high-profile one) once more.

Moral defeats do not lead to victories of any sort

In 1969 playwright and essayist Václav Havel wrote a letter to Alexander Dubček, First Secretary of the Central Committee of Czechoslovakia. Dubček, a reformer, had earned the displeasure of Eastern Europe's Soviet overlords the previous year by instituting a modest platform of reforms, including recognition of individual liberties - freedom of speech, movement, debate, and association - and the end to arbitrary arrests, along with some economic and political refinements.

The Soviets expressed their displeasure by invading Czechoslovakia with a force of several hundred thousand (perhaps even a half-million) Warsaw Pact troops. Seventy-two Czechs and Slovaks were killed over the next two weeks. The entire incident - reform and subsequent invasion - became known as the Prague Spring. The Soviets arrested Dubček and flew him to Moscow, demanding immediate concessions.

Though he was eventually allowed to return to his position in Czechoslovakia, over the next year the Soviets tightened the vise on Dubček, which left him with three courses of action:

1. cave in to the demands of the Soviets and repudiate his reforms, remain in power as the persecutor of his own beliefs, destroying both himself and any remaining faith Czechoslovaks had in morality and faith in others
2. do and say nothing to defend his reforms, which would earn him a quick and summary ejection from the government by the Soviets and the disdain of his countrymen for his weak spine
   
3. publicly re-iterate his commitment to the reforms of the Prague Spring and be cut down at the knees by the USSR, becoming a hero and shining example to every citizen of Czechoslovakia

It was at this crucial moment of Soviet extortion that Havel wrote Dubček, recalling the actions of a former Czech president during the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland:

Remember the dilemma Edvard Beneš faced at the time of Munich. In those days it was not demagogy - there was a real danger that the nation would be exterminated. And at that time, it was you, the communists, who resisted the persuasive arguments for capitulation, and who rightly understood that a de facto defeat need not be a moral defeat; that a moral victory may later become a de facto victory, but a moral defeat, never.

Havel's words ring just as true when one considers the Democratic "leadership" on Capitol Hill. As long as Harry Reid makes excuses about not having the votes to over-ride a presidential veto on any measure seeking to end the Iraq War he is conceding a moral defeat to the forces of the neoconservatives.

We have already passed the point where Reid, by his non-action, has begun to earn the scorn of not only his opponents, but from his own base. Op-eds such as Time for Harry Reid to Step Down? and About Some Lies My Democrats Told Me are illustrative of the rapid erosion of Reid's moral high ground as he continues to dither and protest too much. Democratic Presidential candidate (and the Senate's one-man Vietnam filibuster master) Mike Gravel has written an open letter to Reid instructing him to hold a vote on the war every day until the neoconservative opposition in Congress has been crushed.

It may soon be too late for that strategy, however. The Democrats have squandered nearly a full calendar year since they were swept into office on the promise of ending the war. The continual stalling and testing of the wind by those in the "leadership" have only served to reinforce a quarter century old characterization of the Democratic Party as the party of spinelessness, the party of all bark and no bite, the party comprised of foreign policy lightweights severely lacking the testicular or ovarian fortitude necessary to stand up to more than a light breeze of opposition. Just as Havel indicated nearly forty years ago, the moral defeat of the Democratic Party on this issue cannot, and will not, lead to a victory of any kind. Men and women are dying in Iraq, and the American people have demanded it stop. By failing to grasp the mandate which brought them to power in the first place the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic leadership in Congress has become self-evident. In a short time there will be no hope for victory on this issue for them.

In case you're wondering what happened to Havel, after decades of persecution at the hands of the Soviets he became the last President of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003). Dubček reemerged after decades of enforced silence as speaker of the post-Soviet Czechoslovak federal assembly, but his prestige was damaged because he had not spoken out against the Soviets in 1969 and never moved politically beyond a firm belief in socialism.

You never would have guessed it on your own

• Decades of experience in Washington have trained Bob Novak to see right to the heart of what's going on. He's got the contacts and the finely honed wisdom to bring the truth to the people. In this column, Novak explores in-depth the murky background behind the hiring of several Democrats or non-partisans at the Treasury Department and arrives at a stunning conclusion:

  All this was known to Bush in May 2006 when he tapped Paulson as a Treasury chief who would command respect on Wall Street. It should be no surprise, then, that he is regarded in his own administration less as a true Republican secretary than as a transition to the next Democratic Treasury -- a trademark of a lame-duck regime.

  Yes, that's right. George W. Bush will not be president after the next election. We must alert the populace!
  
  
• Since America is having trouble conquering Iraq, Iran has offered to help us.
  
  
• We're all devo.
  
  
• A court of law has determined, in a horrifying turn of events, that someone on this planet is less fit to be a single parent of two children than Kevin Federline.
  
  
• Rick Santorum may run for governor. I'll stop giggling about that by the end of this week, I swear.
  
  
• Blackwater exonerates itself.
  
  
• The Edwards campaign money-making juggernaut has managed to raise almost as much as Ron Paul in 50% more time. Furthermore, in the entire quarter, he raised slightly more than political heavyweight Bill Richardson!
  
  
• Hillary Clinton compensates for maybe accidentally last week hinting that she might support a military engagement in Iran.

Bah. I'm finished for the night. Go home and enjoy yourselves.

Live Evil

• First Giuliani loved guns more because of 9/11, and now he loves his wife more because of 9/11. And he 9/11's 9/11, because of 9/11. You 9/11 what I 9/11? 9/11 is all about family values, man! (P.S. -- he wasn't even married to this wife on 9/11)
  
  
• I'm so goddam sick of Bush whining about "tax and spend Democrats." That's what taxes are for! You tax people so that the government has money that it can spend on doing things for the good of the nation. Meanwhile, he's taken an actual budget surplus, which could have been used to start paying down the national debt, turned it inside out and upside down, and we're up to our eyeballs in debt to RED CHINA.
  
  
• TPM comments on how much better news coverage is getting in this election cycle.
  
  
• Okay, Huck, you get points for this one.
  
  
• If the Christian Right splinters off into a third party because of Giuliani, things are going to get REAL interesting.
  
  
• I . . . Okay. I get down on the right wing a lot, I know. I tend to think that most aggressively "conservative" policies are toxic, but I'm not unreasonable enough to think that most high-profile conservatives are doing what they do because they genuinely believe it will make the world better. But then there's Bill Kristol, and I honestly cannot think of a way to take the spin off of this so it sounds like he's not a diabolical baby-murderer:

  [W]henever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it's a good idea. I'm happy that the President's willing to do something bad for the kids.

  
  I am aghast.
  
  
• All of this talk about a war with Iran is really starting to freak me out. Because I don't think it's going to have a huge intro like Iraq did. I think that if it happens, Bush is just going to do it and we'll have the discussion about it later. And everything is going to be much, much worse.
  
  
• Ron Paul is going to turn some heads come January and February, mark my words.
  
  
• Bill and Hillary are on the record now disagreeing about torture. This isn't the first time recently I've read about the two of them disagreeing on policy issues (dig her taking potshots at NAFTA). I suspect that this is very much on purpose: Hillary's trying to work it subtly into the minds of voters that she is not Bill, and she's going to have her own administration.

After lunch, I will consider the mad dash towards catching up on news from the past four days.

Briefly

• Hillary Clinton seeks to recapture the crowning achievement of the first Clinton White House, the budget surplus, by giving money to babies. This comes in stark contrast to the second Bush White House, that wants babies to die of the mumps (I'm not even going to link that, because I've been talking about S-CHIP just too damn much).
  
  
• Also, Congress has ideas about the best way to put your tax dollars to work.
  
  
• Question. Which is funnier: The Onion lampooning senior citizens on the internet or a 160-year-old news outlet explaining Facebook?
  
  
• It's official, the internet has a liberal bias. After re-reading that article from The Onion, I decided to type "the google" into my browser's URL bar. It took me to Think Progress.
  
  
• In a civilized world, his wouldn't be news.
  
  
• Chertoff goes to Mexico and Canada, which "illustrates how global the mission of homeland security really is." Note: I'm all for keeping Americans from getting blown up, I just think Chertoff is sort of a dummy.
  

The Hardy Boys & the Case of the Mondays

My day has been a little hectic this morning, so posts may be light or non-existent today. However, in checking my email, I found something I wanted to mention.

Joe Biden is all hot and bothered about how he put a resolution through the Senate, with massive bipartisan support, which would move the strategy in the Iraq war towards creating a "soft partition," by which local ethnic groups function largely as autonomous entities and participate in a stripped down federal government, a la Articles of Confederation. It strikes me as a good plan, a plan some of us suggested four years ago would be the only option for reconciliation in Iraq, and I'm really happy the Senate agrees. However, it's worth being reminded that this resolution was a non-binding, "Sense of the Senate" resolution: a recommendation, not a law or official policy. In short, the Senate is trying to guide Iraq policy with Smiths lyrics.

Biden has a good plan and he should be proud of it, but don't let him or any of his cheerleaders convince you that this vote means a damn thing.