Reason Magazine - Topics > Iraq

The War-Spending Debate You Won't Hear This Week

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:44:00 EDT

The Iraq War is being paid for via the most fiscally irresponsible method in modern American history -- a series of "emergency" supplemental bills, outside the normal vetting of the budgeting process, several years after any of the costs could at all be described as being unplanned "emergencies." You knew all this, because you read Veronique de Rugy's groundbreaking May cover story about how congressional Republicans ripped the lid off of all previous restraints on a system that is as easy to abuse as the phrase "support our troops."

This week we are experiencing the ugly results -- Democrats are cramming into the latest $195 billion emergency supplemental bill $11 billion in unemployment benefits, among other non-defense items. That likely pales in comparison to the cost of unvetted weaponry goodies that the Department of Defense is shoving into the package; meanwhile, President Bush has also thrown in extraneous crap, such as $770 million for international food aid.

If the federal government was playing by rules that were in effect as recently as 2000, emergency expenditures would mostly be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget, war funding would have been enveloped into the normal defense-budgeting process by no later than 2005, and -- this bit is underappreciated -- we might actually know the real-world price tag of the war, because budgeteers would have made at least a half-assed attempt at filing war-related expenditures under the same category, instead of willfully blurring the lines.

Instead of any of that, politicians this week, including the major-party presidential candidates, will argue about withdrawal timetables that'll never become law, then eventually agree to spend another couple hundred billion dollars without anything resembling oversight or basic fiduciary responsibility. And if Democrats aren't making even the slightest noises about reforming this system now, it's hard to imagine them suddenly getting religion only after increasing their majorities in Congress and re-taking the White House.

London Calling to the Zombies of Death

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:59:00 EDT

The most interesting thing about Boris Johnson's victory in the London mayoral race might be what hasn't changed. The office has moved from the hard left to the hard right, but there's one issue where it is staying put:

London voters just voted out Ken Livingstone, the iconoclast left-wing antiwar mayor, and replaced him with the iconoclast right-wing antiwar Boris Johnson....

Johnson is not a neocon. In fact, he comes from the same sort of paleo-conservative roots as Pat Buchanan. He is opposed to British imperial dreams, and is in direct conflict with much of the UK Conservative Party.

In the last few years, he has been a strong opponent of the Iraq War, the rush to war with Iran, and Blair's crackdown on civil liberties.

Something else that hasn't changed: The mayor of Greater London does not, alas, have much influence on his country's foreign policy.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:30:00 EDT

I don't know how this story slipped by me last week:

Llewellyn Werner admits he is facing obstacles most amusement park developers never have to deal with -- insurgent attacks and looting.

When you are building an amusement park in downtown Baghdad, those risks come with the territory.

Mr Werner, chairman of C3, a Los Angeles-based holding company for private equity firms, is pouring millions of dollars into developing the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience, a massive American-style amusement park that will feature a skateboard park, rides, a concert theatre and a museum. It is being designed by the firm that developed Disneyland....

A $1 million skateboard park, the first phase of the development, will open in July. Parts for 200,000 skateboards and materials to build ramps will be shipped from America to Iraq for assembly at state-owned factories and distributed free to Iraqi children along with helmets and knee pads.

If the attraction does open as planned, I'd be curious to learn how many of its costs are being borne by private investors who actually expect it to be a profitable park, and how many are being subsidized -- via government factories, government security, or any other means -- by leaders eager to establish a Potemkin Disneyland.

Al Qaeda No. 2 Slags U.S., Iran, Sunnis, Starbucks Coffee

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:35:00 EDT

From the AP, via the Cincy Enquirer:

Al-Qaida's No. 2 said in an audiotape released Friday that the United States will lose whether it stays in Iraq or withdraws, and he sneered that President Bush just wants to pass the problem on to his successor....
"The truth is that if Bush keeps all his forces in Iraq until doomsday and until they enter hell, they will only see crisis and defeat by the will of God," said al-Zawahri, the deputy of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.
"If the American forces leave, they will lose everything. And if they stay, they will bleed to death," he said....
He said Tehran "has clear goals, which are the annexation of southern Iraq and the east of the Arabian Peninsula" as well as strengthening ties to its followers in southern Lebanon.
He said that if Iran achieves its goals, "this will add oil to the fire which is already ablaze. This will explode the situation in an already exploding region."

The tape, which is titled "Five Years of the Invasion of Iraq and Decades of Injustice by Tyrants," couldn't be verified but the AP noted it "the logo of al-Qaida's media wing," for what that's worth. Al-Zawahiri also trashed Iraqi Sunnis who created "Awakening Councils" and joined up with American forces.

More here.

What say you, Hit & Runners? Is A-Z right that U.S. options are all bad? That God is on al Qaeda's side? That Iran is on the march regionally? That the title of this audiotape sounds like a track from Love's Forever Changes? And shouldn't he be asking whether al Qaeda is bleeding to death in Iraq and elsewhere?

Barack's Bitter Truth

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has gotten much heat for suggesting that when people lose faith in Washington, they "end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms [and] gay marriage."

How strange, then, that during his questioning last week of the two most senior American officials in Iraq, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama took a minimalist view of what America could do to help Iraqi citizens regain faith in their government. Instead, the Illinois senator lowered the criterion for American "success" in Iraq, declaring that he could live with "a messy, sloppy status quo" in the country.

Obama's line of questioning was shrewd. With Petraeus he focused on al Qaeda, pushing the general to admit that the complete elimination of the group in Iraq was not necessary. Here's how Obama put it: "Our goal is not to hunt down and eliminate every single trace, but rather to create a manageable situation where they're not posing a threat to Iraq or using it as a base to launch attacks outside of Iraq. Is that accurate?"

"That is exactly right," Petraeus replied.

Obama then turned to Iran and questioned Crocker, the point man in the America-Iranian dialogue in Baghdad. As with Petraeus, Obama sought to lower the benchmark for what the United States should define as Iraqi "success." However, Crocker was less pliable. When Obama argued that it was unlikely that Iranian influence in Iraq could be terminated, Crocker responded: "[W]e have no problem with a good, constructive relationship between Iran and Iraq. The problem is with the Iranian strategy of backing extremist militia groups and sending in weapons and munitions that are used against Iraqis and against our own forces."

Obama didn't offer a convincing rejoinder to Crocker's protest. Instead, his time almost up, he cut to the crux of the exchange: a summary of his position on the war for an electorate that, he knew, would be listening to his every word. Obama's views were best captured in this passage:

And, see, the problem I have is if the definition of success is so high, no traces of Al Qaida and no possibility of reconstitution, a highly-effective Iraqi government, a Democratic multiethnic, multi-sectarian functioning democracy, no Iranian influence, at least not of the kind that we don't like, then that portends the possibility of us staying for 20 or 30 years.

If, on the other hand, our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo but there's not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an Al Qaida base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measurable timeframe, and that, I think, is what everybody here on this committee has been trying to drive at, and we haven't been able to get as clear of an answer as we would like.

As the Lebanese commentator Hussain Abdul-Hussain bitingly wrote: "Obama's description of a post-America Iraq looked pretty much like post-1991 Iraq under Saddam Hussein: a country 'struggling along' but that was no ‘threat to its neighbors' and was not 'an al Qaeda base.'"

Indeed, but Obama was surely right in assuming that many Americans, perhaps a majority, have no problem with this. Saddam's brutality was never something they worried about. If you moved the goalposts a bit, Obama told them, failure would magically become success. The U.S. could head toward the exit in Iraq with its conscience clear.

The difficulty with Obama's appraisal was not just that it was based on a selective reading of the situation in Iraq, so that his assertion of how the U.S. had to realistically accept continued Iranian influence in the country somehow morphed into tolerance for Iran's systematic undermining of American interests there. The difficulty was not just that Obama over-optimistically assumed that his "messy status quo" could be sustained even if the U.S. removed most of its troops from Iraq (a point Crocker tried to make, before being cut off by Senator Joe Biden); the real difficulty with Obama's case was that it revived an American reading of Iraq that treats Iraqis as secondary characters in their own drama.

For the first two years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration was guilty of the same behavior. Iraq was about America and American power. Iraq's 2005 elections were the first real sign that Washington understood why the Iraqis mattered. Yet it was the 2007 surge that took this realization to new heights. U.S. commanders grasped that the security of Iraqi cities and civilians had to be the centerpiece of a new counter-insurgency strategy requiring U.S. soldiers to insert themselves more than ever into Iraqi society. Iraq's complex social dynamics were studied and, as effectively as possible depending on location, acted upon. For the first time the discussion in the U.S. seriously addressed what a pullout might mean in terms of Iraqi suffering.

That's why Obama's comments were so off-putting. He effectively told the Iraqis, once again, that they weren't worth anything to America. If violence and corruption were controllable, if al Qaeda was still around but was limited to Iraq proper, if Washington could stomach the Iranian manipulation of Iraqis, then it made little difference what the deeper aspirations of Iraqis in general were. Iraq could be a suppurating wound at the heart of the Middle East—a suppurating wound, Obama has tirelessly reminded us, which the U.S. helped create—but that counted for little when faced with the American urge to get out as soon as possible.

In his own defense, Obama might remind us that he's accountable only to his countrymen, not to the Iraqis; that the "good government" he has talked about in his campaign applies to embittered Americans, not to Iraqis embittered by the prospect of a precipitous U.S. departure. He might even be elected on that basis. But this would show that Obama, who has sold himself as a man of vision at home, is selfishly unimaginative abroad. Worse, because it is unlikely he will be able to much alter U.S. policy in Iraq, since Iran will not cede much more to the next administration than it did to this one, Obama's promises are potentially deceitful.

For as long as American leaders don't treat Iraqis as important in their own right, the Iraqis will have no incentive to tie their long-term interests to America's wagon. Should that matter? Both realists and idealists would probably answer in the affirmative. But where does Barack Obama stand? It's hard to imagine that Iraqis see in him change they can believe in.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

But Officer, the Seat Belt Doesn't Fit Over My Explosive Vest

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:41:00 EDT

We must be turning the corner in Iraq, because police in Baghdad have begun enforcing a law that requires drivers to wear seat belts. "Some might say that there are more pressing issues," The New York Times concedes, "like the car bombs that can turn a morning commute into a nightmare of blood and body parts, the daily killings and kidnappings, the political and sectarian infighting." Then again, maybe the seat belt law reflects Iraqis' aspirations to be like the peaceful, affluent countries of the West:

"It is a symbol of civilization," said a taxi driver, Ahmed Wahayid, whose 1993 Hyundai Elantra was stuck in a long line of cars waiting to clear a checkpoint. "Western people in Europe and America have it, so we are like them."

But forcing people to wear seat belts may represent the wrong kind of normality:

Brig. Gen. Zuhair Abada Mraweh, traffic commander for the capital's Rusafah district...said that the seat belt legislation—which applies only to drivers, not passengers—was in effect during the government of Saddam Hussein.

According to the Times, by the way, Mraweh "said that there were no dependable statistics on traffic accidents, but that enforcing the law would reduce them by 70 percent." If seat belts in Iraq prevent crashes, I guess that's why car bombers don't wear them.

"Here's a gun, and here's a beer"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:20:00 EDT

Over at Radar, reason contributor Marty Beckerman plugs in a genuinely confusing bit from Fox News earlier this week in which the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) goes on a tear about how troops under 21 are "malleable" and hence shouldn't be able to drink legally. The context isn't clear and the video is very Zapruder-quality. But watch it and decide for yourself.

On Monday Fox News Channel aired a debate between Candy Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and Alex Koroknay-Palicz of the National Youth Rights Association, which contends that if you're old enough to vote, marry, and join the Army, you're old enough to guzzle Jäger. As you can imagine, Lightner was unimpressed, and rather vocal about it:

Koroknay-Palicz said U.S. soldiers between the ages of 18 and 21 should have the legal right to drink a beer, which seems more than reasonable considering that they might, you know, die at any moment. (You need to unwind after your day at work?) But Lightner was disgusted that our fighting men and women would have the audacity to imbibe. She ranted that 18-year-olds haven't "developed, and that's exactly why the draft age is 18, because these kids are malleable." She added: "They will follow the leader, they don't think for themselves, and they are the last ones I want to say, 'Here's a gun, and here's a beer.' They are not adult—that's why they're in the military. They are not adults."

More here.

Update: Over at reason.tv's Rough Cut blog, Dan Hayes has posted video of a Fox News debate about whether the drinking age should be lowered, a move that several states are considering. Check that out here.

And last April, reason Senior Editor Radley Balko interviewed former Middlebury College President John McCardell, Jr., who heads up Choose Responsibility, a group that advocates repealing the drinking age back to 18. Read that here.

Patience is Not a Policy

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

When he was the Democratic leader in the Senate, George Mitchell ruefully reflected that his job had given him "the best-developed patience muscle in Washington." The war in Iraq has done similar things for the rest of us. But the strengthening program is by no means done. Gen. David Petraeus was on Capitol Hill this week explaining why we need to keep on exercising forbearance, and keep on, and keep on.

By his reckoning, and that of Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the administration's policy of escalation has been a success. Violence has come down, political reconciliation is underway, and the Iraqi government is showing more initiative. Heck, Crocker marveled, you even see the newly designed Iraqi flag in all parts of the country, not just some.

We poured in more troops, we accomplished what we set out to do, and now we can start bringing our troops home—which, after all, was the whole point of the surge announced by President Bush 15 months ago. Right? Wrong. It turns out that we have accomplished only enough to allow us to remain in Iraq indefinitely with more forces than we had when the surge began.

Where is Goldilocks when we need her? According to the administration, the circumstances for leaving are always too hot or too cold, but never just right. Petraeus thinks withdrawals should cease in July, at which time there will still be 140,000 American troops in Iraq—compared to about 132,000 when Bush embarked on this course.

The end of the drawdown is commonly referred to as a "pause" but it looks more like a full stop. Petraeus is not willing to commit to reduce troop strength even by September, more than a year and a half after the escalation began. "Withdrawing too many forces too quickly," he insists, "could jeopardize the progress of the past year." All he offers come September—grudgingly—is a promise to "commence a process of assessment" to see if he might be willing to trim the numbers just a bit.

What this illustrates is that no matter what happens in Iraq, the Bush policy is always the same: stay the course. Says Brookings Institution national security analyst Ivo Daalder, "First we couldn't withdraw because things were bad. Then we couldn't withdraw because things were getting better. Now we can't withdraw because things might get worse."

No one in the administration camp is willing to reject an open-ended commitment. Supporters of John McCain complain Democrats have distorted his declaration that he would be willing to stay in Iraq 100 years—since he said that "would be fine with me" only "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."

Fair enough. So how long would he be willing to stay as long as Americans are being injured, harmed, wounded and killed? Apparently he is not willing to put any expiration date on our obligation. Sound policy, he told a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience in Kansas City this week, "will require that we keep a sufficient level of American forces in Iraq until security conditions are such that our commanders on the ground recommend otherwise."

Well, suppose security conditions never reach the desired point—which, judging from the recent eruption of violence, is entirely possible. Then what? McCain offers no option except continuing the fight—no matter how long it takes, no matter how bloody it is, no matter the long-term damage to the Army, no matter how slow the political progress, no matter how much it costs.

His Democratic rivals propose to begin a deliberate, phased withdrawal in 2009. To let this war go on for six full years before we finally begin turning it over to the Iraqis suggests, if anything, an excess of patience. Yet McCain portrays such talk as "reckless and irresponsible."

If so, that's only because the surge has yet to produce the dramatic overall progress that its supporters envisioned at the start. Petraeus says we have to stay because the gains are "fragile and reversible." And he acknowledged, "We haven't turned any corners. We haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel."

We may never. In that case, McCain and his allies are prepared to keep stumbling through the dark.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Million Lemmings March

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:20:00 EDT

News that Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr had called off his planned "Million-Man March" against the U.S. occupation (while also pondering withdrawal from the eight-month ceasefire that has reduced violence levels in the country) is a timely reminder that few things in this world are as resonant as particularly inspired acts of American political branding.

In the ~~11.5~~ 12.5 years since probably less than a million black men descended upon the capital, we've had the semi-coherent follow-up Million Family March, the related Million Father March and Million Woman March, the 10th anniversary Millions More Movement, plus the anti-gun Million Mom March, the pro-gun Million Gun March, the 10,000-strong Million Worker March, Robert Mugabe's Million Man March in Zimbabwe, the Million Step March across North Carolina, the impeach-Bush Million Phone March, the obesity-fightin' Million Calorie March, a Million Mind March organized by somebody named Rebecca, the Million Musicians March in Austin (of course) to free Tibet (of course), the self-explanatory Million Marijuana March, and the recent Million Fag March against the crazy Westboro Baptist Church. I for one am looking forward to the upcoming Million Paul March, the Million DJ March this August, and the Million Robot March of 2056.

I was first awed by the power of American political sloganeering some time in the early 1990s, when a Czech politician was looking for a catchy new tough-on-crime law, but lacked the powerful national metaphor of baseball (on account of Czechs not having any clue how to play it). His solution? "Three Strikes Are Enough!"

Petraeus at the Senate

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:28:00 EDT

From the L.A. Times' account of yesterday's Senate hearings on the Iraq War:

As expected, back-to-back Senate committee hearings spotlighting Army Gen. David H. Petraeus became a confrontation between two immovable forces. But there was no real decision at stake: President Bush is expected Thursday to endorse Petraeus' recommendation for a suspension of withdrawals in July, insisting that security gains over the last 15 months can lead toward a sustainable future, with continued U.S. help....
Democrat after Democrat, including the party's two remaining presidential contenders, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, questioned whether the costs of the strategy proposed by Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who also testified, were too high....
By keeping force levels at 140,000 into the autumn -- a few thousand more than before Bush announced the troop buildup in January 2007 -- U.S. officials can build on recent gains and the Iraqi government can gradually take over responsibility, he argued.

"This approach does not allow establishment of a set withdrawal timetable," he acknowledged. "However, it does provide the flexibility those of us on the ground need to preserve the still fragile security gains our troopers have fought so hard and sacrificed so much to achieve."

Petraeus refused to specify what might take place following a recommended 45-day suspension in troop reductions....

Not surprisingly, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lauded Petraeus: "This means rejecting, as we did in 2007, the calls for a reckless and irresponsible withdrawal of our forces at the moment we are succeeding." Beyond the Dems, he was countered by several GOP senators, including Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, who noted, "Simply appealing for more time to make progress is insufficient."

More here.

reason's current cover story on "The Trillion Dollar War" here. More on Iraq here.

The Trillion-Dollar War

info@reason.com (Veronique de Rugy) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

At the end of December, Congress approved $70 billion in bridge funding—a down payment to cover the gap between the beginning of the fiscal year and the passage of the actual appropriation bill—to keep financing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Legislators at the time were still chewing on the rest of President George W. Bush’s request for a fiscal year 2008 war budget of $196 billion. Should that funding be appropriated—and if recent history is any guide, it certainly will—then the total price tag for America’s present wars will rise to at least $822 billion, approximately 80 percent of which will be spent on Iraq. That surpasses the cost of the Vietnam War ($670 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars). And the Iraq portion dwarfs the $50 billion to $60 billion cost predicted at the outset of the war by Mitch Daniels, then director of the Office of Management and Budget.

These runaway costs do not include a single dollar from the Pentagon’s annual operating budget, which in 2008 reached a whopping $481 billion. If the war were being accounted for based on a rational, transparent budget process instead of an opaque and politicized shell game, Americans would be painfully aware that we are now in the seventh year of what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has called a $1 trillion war.

How much money is $1 trillion? Enough to pay for the entire 1976 federal budget, adjusted for inflation. Enough to write a check for $37,500 to every Iraqi man, woman, and child. Enough to buy 169,492 Black Hawk helicopters, or 455 stealth bombers. Enough, in nominal terms, to pay for the entire federal government from 1789 to 1957. And it’s 10 times more than what specialists predict it would take to eradicate malaria once and for all.

To distract people from the real price tag of a two-front war, the president and Congress have used an unprecedented and fiscally irresponsible budgetary trick: a series of “emergency” supplemental spending bills totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. This scheme has allowed them not only to hide the costs of the conflicts but also to avoid painful budget choices while funneling billions of dollars in unvetted goodies to favored interest groups.

Once a small blip among federal outlays, emergency supplementals have exploded since 2002, when the Republican Congress let a key legislative restriction on their use expire. In May 2007, President Bush signed into law the biggest supplemental bill in history, $120 billion, to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan ($100 billion) and pay for hurricane recovery and agricultural disaster relief at home. This came just five months after Congress approved another $70 billion emergency request for the wars. By contrast, the average annual amount of emergency supplemental spending in the 1990s—a decade that saw interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo—was just $13.8 billion (see Figure 1).

Supplemental spending does more harm than merely obfuscating the costs of military conflict. It effectively removes the upper limit on the White House’s war budget. It allows the Pentagon to seek and receive much more funding for mundane operations than it could receive via the normal budget process. And its comparative lack of oversight encourages Congress to shovel out pork to Gulf Coast shrimp harvesters, Hawaiian highway builders, Florida orange growers, and other recipients who have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. As Bush prepares to exit office, this out-of-control spending stands to become one of his most lasting and nefarious legacies.

Bush’s Supplemental Shell Game
President Bush has never included a comprehensive war spending request in his annual February budget. Instead, he has submitted emergency war requests to Capitol Hill, usually sometime in the spring, weeks after the defense appropriation subcommittees begin picking through the Pentagon budget.

Last year, for instance, the president submitted a defense budget request of $481 billion for fiscal year 2008. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were covered in an entirely separate $142 billion emergency supplemental request. In October the administration increased that request to $196 billion, leaving Congress to face a dilemma that has become all too familiar since 2001: quickly approve billions of dollars in supplemental war funding without knowing where the money is going or face browbeating accusations of not supporting the troops. In the end, after little discussion, Congress passed its $70 billion down payment.

Although there are no official limits on the amount or type of spending that can be designated as an emergency appropriation, historically there has been an understanding that emergencies are sudden, unforeseen, temporary conditions posing a threat to life, property, or national security. In September 2005, for instance, after Hurricane Katrina smashed the Gulf Coast, the president quickly requested and Congress readily approved a $52 billion emergency bill.

The costs of the war may be necessary and temporary, but they are by no means sudden or unforeseen. The war in Afghanistan started in October 2001, and the war in Iraq commenced in March 2003. Furthermore, the easy-to-predict salaries and benefits of Army National Guard personnel and reservists called to active duty amount to some of the largest expenditures in the supplemental bills.

“The Bush administration’s use of so-called ‘emergency’ supplemental funding to pay for Afghanistan and Iraq is truly unprecedented,” says Travis Sharp, a military policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a nonpartisan research organization specializing in international security and arms control issues. Historically, while emergency supplementals were the most frequent means of financing the initial stages of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War, past administrations and Congresses funded subsequent military operations in regular appropriation bills as soon as even the crudest of cost projections could be made, according to a June 2006 Congressional Research Service study.

In 1951, for instance, 72 percent of the kick-off cost for the Korean War —$33 billion in today’s dollars—went through supplemental appropriations, while $13 billion came from regular appropriations. But by year two, Congress appropriated 98 percent of the war’s funding through the regular defense budget. By 1953 the president no longer requested any funding outside of the regular defense budget.

The decade-long Vietnam War followed a similar pattern. In the first year of the war, Congress provided all of the funding in emergency supplemental bills. The second year, the administration requested a little less than 50 percent of the war funding within regular defense appropriations. By the fourth year, all of the war funding went through the regular defense budget process. This despite the fact that troop levels were in flux, military strategies were changing regularly, and the duration of the conflict could not be foreseen. In the 1990s, the Republican-led Congress showed a kind of discipline it would completely forget during the Bush presidency, directing President Bill Clinton in fiscal year 1996 to fund all ongoing military operations, including the enforcement of no-fly zones over Iraq, from the regular defense budget rather than supplementals. From then on, Clinton sought funding for Bosnia and other conflicts entirely through the regular appropriations process.

In the 1980s, throughout President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup, no Cold War spending was allocated through supplementals (see Figure 2). And once you account for the offsetting contributions from American allies during and after the first Gulf War ($35 billion out of the total $42 billion price tag), it is clear that until recently very little U.S. military spending was treated as an emergency.

What a difference with today’s wars. Five years into the Iraq conflict and seven years into Afghanistan, the administration and Congress have buried all of the explicit funding—totaling more than the spending on either the Korea or Vietnam wars when adjusted for inflation—in emergency supplementals.

What changed? Aside from internal fiscal discipline, the single biggest procedural shift came in 2002, when the Congress let lapse a law that had required budget cuts to “offset” emergency expenditures.

Who benefited? The Pentagon, the political party that ran Washington in the early 2000s, and their friends.

“The Bush administration is clearly capable of projecting costs in Iraq,” says Travis Sharp, “and has simply ignored historical precedent.”

The Size of the Con
This year the Department of Defense once again failed to include the cost of war in its record-breaking $515 billion defense budget for fiscal year 2009. Instead, it included a placeholder for yet another $70 billion emergency war supplemental—which, conveniently for the administration, does not get counted in deficit projections.

Pressed by Democrats during the annual defense budget hearings in February, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates confirmed that the $70 billion was only a small fraction of the total expected war cost for the year. Pressed further, Gates estimated that military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would cost at least $170 billion in 2009.

He immediately added, “I have no confidence in that figure.”

From the beginning, the administration has argued that supplemental bills have the advantage of being prepared closer to the time when the funds will be used, allowing for a more accurate assessment of needs and quicker access to money. It also notes that making the spending separate prevents it from becoming a permanent feature of the defense budget. In other words, the administration argues, using supplemental bills is the fiscally responsible thing to do.

A more likely explanation has little to do with military strategy or budgetary concerns, and everything to do with the fact that “emergency” spending has very beneficial features for big spenders in Washington.

In 1990, under bipartisan congressional pressure to reduce the size of the deficit, President George H.W. Bush signed the Budget Enforcement Act (BEA), which exempted emergency bills from other rules of the era designed to restrain spending. The BEA allowed the government to exclude emergency spending from the deficit projections required in the annual budget. To prevent lawmakers from abusing that loophole, the law required that Congress offset supplemental spending with rescissions—that is, by permanently withholding already appropriated funds.

For a while, this plan worked well, at least by today’s standards. According to a 2005 Congressional Research Service report, between 1981 and 2002 Congress offset an average of 40 percent of supplemental appropriations with rescissions. And those emergencies weren’t for war; during the recession- and inflation-plagued early 1980s, supplementals were used to fund mandatory outlays for unemployment compensation. In the early 1990s, the purpose shifted to natural disaster relief.

But Congress let the BEA expire in 2002. Since then, supplemental appropriations exceeding budget caps have no longer triggered automatic cuts elsewhere. Today the only legislative limit on emergency spending is a congressional prerogative to raise a point of order to protest the “emergency” designation. This happens rarely if ever.

The floodgates are now open. According to data compiled by the Congressional Research Service, inflation-adjusted supplemental spending has increased nearly fivefold in less than three decades, from $36 billion in fiscal year 1980 to $160 billion in 2007, boosting its share of the overall budget authority from 3 percent to 7 percent. And these numbers don’t even catch all of the federal government’s “emergency” spending measures, because some are attached to regular appropriations, such as the December 2007 omnibus bill containing the $70 billion bridge fund.

But for a true measure of the increase, we ought to look at supplemental spending as a share of total new discretionary spending. And there, the trend lines are striking (see Figure 3). Except for a sharp spike in 1991 to fund the first Gulf War (which was largely offset later), emergency appropriations remained a very small share of new discretionary spending through most of the 1990s, staying below 3 percent. Compare that to 2007, when Congress appropriated over 18.3 percent of all discretionary spending through the supplemental process.

This profligacy is par for the course with President Bush. Since fiscal year 2001, the Bush White House has expanded federal spending by 66 percent, in nominal terms, enacting extremely expensive and pork-swollen bills covering agriculture, highway, energy, and prescription drugs while doubling the same federal education budget that Republicans once sought to eliminate.

Regular military appropriations, too, have more than doubled under Bush. According to the Office of Management and Budget, the $481 billion defense request for fiscal year 2008 is 66 percent higher than the budget Bush inherited from Clinton in 2001. If you add to that amount the $196 billion of requested emergency war funding, the Pentagon’s budget is, in inflation-adjusted dollars, larger today than at any point since the end of World War II.

Even that staggering amount strikes Winslow Wheeler, director of the Strauss Military Reform Project at the nonpartisan Center for Defense Information, as incomplete. Wheeler argues that an inclusive definition of the defense budget should also include the $18 billion requested for nuclear weapon costs by the Department of Energy and another $6 billion for miscellaneous defense costs borne by other agencies, such as the General Service Administration, plus funding for the National Defense Stockpile, the Selective Service, some Coast Guard, and the International FBI. Together, that would make a grand total of $700 billion for 2008.

The real number may be higher still, when factoring in the billions of dollars in other federal programs that are spent as a direct result of maintaining the military. According to Christopher Hellman, a defense analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, you could include $43 billion spent on homeland security activities outside of the Pentagon (mainly through the Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Justice), $88 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, a portion of the estimated $40 billion intelligence budget, and some of the $9 billion spent annually on foreign military aid, plus expenditures on international peacekeeping, nonproliferation, antiterrorism, demining, military space programs, employees’ and retirees’ compensation and benefits at the Pentagon, veterans’ benefits, military pensions, and, finally, a conservative $100 billion estimate for the share of the country’s annual interest payment on the national debt that is directly attributable to past military spending. That gives us a grand total of nearly $1 trillion—that’s 12 zeros—in national security spending for 2008 alone.

Even when using only direct outlays by the Defense Department, 2008 funding was more than 100 percent above 2001. It is unlikely that the president would have been able to achieve such an increase if he had to include the costs of war in his budget requests. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, spelled out the utility of shell-game finance in an April 12, 2005, report: “Congress should fund operations in Iraq through emergency supplemental appropriations (because funding it through the regular appropriations process would unnecessarily inflate the defense budget).”

Well, yes, exactly. As a Defense News editorial put it in 2005, the White House is “using the supplemental as a thinly veiled political attempt to keep the public from lapsing into sticker shock, and so, losing support for the war.”

At a requested $892 billion and counting—including a new $70 billion emergency war request for fiscal 2009—the Global War on Terror is now the second priciest conflict in U.S. history in inflation-adjusted terms (see Table 1). Only World War II cost more: $3.2 trillion in adjusted 2007
dollars.

And that’s only for the direct cost of the war. As my colleague Tyler Cowen at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center wrote in The Washington Post last November, “these figures don’t quite get at Iraq’s real cost,” because they focus on what we paid for rather than recognizing what we have lost. Among other things, Cowen lists more than 3,800 U.S. soldiers dead and more than 28,000 wounded (many of them severely), more than 1,000 private contractors killed and many more injured, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths—plus the contributions that all of these people would have made to their families and to humanity at large. A newly released study by the Harvard economist Linda Bilmes puts the combined war costs as high as $3 trillion.

Christmastime for the Pentagon
War supplementals have become the Pentagon’s tool of choice to obtain more funding than it would otherwise receive. Helped by its friends in Congress, the Defense Department keeps finding pretexts to move nonemergency programs, including some wholly unrelated to the war, into emergency supplementals. This frees space under the baseline to stuff in additional spending.

Winslow Wheeler has traced where these “transfer” stunts are readily apparent in the department’s procurement accounts. For example, in the account for “Aircraft Procurement, Army” on page 249 of the regular 2006 Pentagon budget, there is the notation “Transfer to Title IX,” indicating $11.2 million deducted from the president’s regular annual request that was originally intended to purchase “aircraft survivability equipment.” The money is then reinserted on page 477 in Title IX, under the designation of “emergency” spending.

In this one procurement account alone, Wheeler counted 17 such transfers from peacetime budgeting to “emergency” war spending, totaling $654 million, plus another $107 million more in the small print. The best part of the maneuver from the Pentagon’s point of view, Wheeler says, is that the transferred money freed space to buy one F-15E fighter-bomber ($65 million), two Littoral Combat Ships ($440 million), and hundreds of other smaller items. Because similar gimmicks are used in most of the regular budget’s procurement accounts, Pentagon watchers say that the emergency transfers add up to tens of billions of dollars, allowing the Defense Department to boost other parts of its budget by an equal amount.

The practice is so routine and uncontroversial that the military openly admits it. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker testified before the Senate in 2005 that the Army preferred to fund 30,000 additional troops through supplementals because if it included the necessary funds in its annual budget request, it “would have to displace other things that are too important to us as we transform—equipment and other readiness issues. So the department has elected to do it with emergency and supplemental funding since we have the options to do so.”

The president’s latest emergency war request included many nonemergency items, some not even related to war. According to a document released by the Senate Budget Committee, $4 billion of the $196 billion officially allocated for the wars has nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan, including $500 million for six electronic warfare planes (neither the insurgents in Iraq nor Al Qaeda has an air force or radar) and $400 million for two developmental aircraft that won’t see service until 2013.

This practice is about to get much worse. After years of war, U.S. military equipment is wearing out five times faster than normal. In the next few years, says the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation’s Travis Sharp, we can expect many more high-priced “emergency” Pentagon wish lists for equipment that may or may not be used in the emergencies being funded. “The problem,” Sharp says, “is that the line between war-related spending and normal Department of Defense ‘base’ budget spending is increasingly becoming blurred.” The price tag for equipment replacement is impossible to predict.

The Pentagon recently made such budgetary bait-and-switches even easier by greatly expanding the definition of “war costs” while putting the finishing touches on its fiscal 2007 war supplemental. Now reconstituting or replacing military equipment for the “longer war on terror” is reason enough to designate a military line item as an “emergency.” So any new toy the Pentagon wants can be stuffed in a supplemental bill. No congressional review need be done, and no compensatory sacrifices need be made in the regular budget. Nor are any real explanations needed. Emergency supplementals are not required to contain the “budget justifications” that are attached to all items in non-emergency defense bills.

Adding final insult to injury, the Department of Defense deliberately obscures what exactly is being spent on war. During past conflicts, the Pentagon usually established a separate account to keep track of operation funds. However, no such account exists for the war in Iraq. It’s impossible to tell in 2008 how much the U.S. is spending on defense and where the money is going.

On Capitol Hill, Everybody Wins!
The Pentagon is not the only shill in the supplemental shell game. Everyone in Washington is addicted to the fiction of the “emergency” loophole. These bills have become a magnet for pork and other projects that would have a much tougher time getting funded on their own merits. Because no member wants to vote against emergency aid money to support the troops, and because most supplemental spending does not count against House and Senate budget limits, Congress has used the legislation to get around the Bush administration’s recent rhetoric about limiting the growth of spending unrelated to defense or homeland security. An increasing number of nonemergency, nondefense programs have found their way into emergency war bills, increasing overall government spending without the usual consequences.

Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, explains: “The common usage of defense supplemental bills has increased non-defense spending as well. Lawmakers now try to shift budget-resolution funds from defense to domestic programs, knowing that these defense funds can be replenished by adding to the next supplemental bill.” For instance, in May 2006, House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) asked that $6 billion from proposed defense increases be shifted to erase almost $4 billion worth of cuts in domestic programs.

The best example of Congress’s propensity to stuff supplemental bills with pork items can be found in the most recent supplemental, signed by the president in June 2007, which contained $24 billion in nonemergency spending. That included $120 million for the shrimp and menhaden fishing industries, $283 million for the Milk Income Loss Contract program, $60 million for salmon fisheries, $100 million for California citrus growers, $50 million for asbestos mitigation at the U.S. Capitol Plant, $1 billion for avian flu, and $1 billion for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The Real Emergency
These earmarks obviously should not fall under the rubric of emergency spending, but then neither should have most of the $120 billion bill. More than two years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast, Congress should be able to fund federal relief through the regular appropriations process. In fact, Congress should be able to fund most hurricane relief through the regular appropriations process, given that the hurricane season is a predictable annual event.
Defense spending may be important, but it does not defy the laws of economics or the rules of good governance. It is ludicrous to believe that every increase in the military budget is a good increase.

Yet despite spending more than ever, and more sloppily than ever, on defense, the White House, the Pentagon, and some big military spenders among Washington’s think tank intelligentsia would like us to believe that the bloated Pentagon budget is frail and in desperate need of more cash. They are more capable of saying this with a straight face because for years now so many costs of war have been hidden in supplemental bills.

The best way to allocate defense resources most effectively is to force a tradeoff between priority items and wasteful boondoggles in the regular defense budgeting process. Yet the exact opposite is happening. Instead of having to justify dumping more billions into controversial old weapons programs such as the Air Force’s F-22 stealth fighter, the Marine Corps’ tilt-wing V-22 Osprey, the Navy’s DDG-1000 stealth destroyer and its Virginia-class attack submarine, the Pentagon can simply move those over into the “emergency” file and put off hard choices.

The Democratic Congress could use the immense cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as leverage for some long-overdue waste cutting at the Pentagon. Alternatively, Congress could decide that $1 trillion for defense is worth every penny and instead make some long-overdue compensatory reductions on the domestic side of the budget.

But if the U.S. is to ever make progress toward budgetary sanity, the federal government must stop pretending that war-related costs are somehow separate from the budget of a department whose mission is to fight and win the nation’s wars. That won’t happen until Washington stops pretending that predictable costs are an “emergency.” The emergency at the Pentagon is the way it is deliberately squandering hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Details, Schmetails

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:58:00 EDT

Some interesting exchanges from a Jewish Journal interview with John McCain:

McCain also defended his support of the controversial Rev. John Hagee, a staunchly pro-Israel evangelical who has been criticized for his anti-Catholic comments. I asked the senator how he would get pro-Israel evangelicals, who have been staunchly opposed to Israel giving up territory or compromising on the status of Jerusalem, to support any peace agreement.

"You can't jump ahead here," he said. "I know they favor a peace process. I know they favor that because of my close relations with them, and pastor John Hagee ... is one of the leaders of the pro-Israel-evangelical movement in America."

I started to correct him -- Hagee and other evangelicals most certainly don't support compromise on territory or Jerusalem, and McCain must know this. That's when I got my first taste of the famous McCain technique: I'll-talk-so-you-can't.

"Look," he cut me off, "I just have to tell you that we should be so grateful for the support of the evangelical movement for the state of Israel, given the influence that they have, beneficial influence that they have over millions of Americans, and then we'll worry about a peace process later on, but I know that they are committed to peace between Palestinians and Israelis as well." [...]
Does he think the war has strengthened Iran in the region?

"I think that our failures for nearly four years obviously did it," the senator said. "But I believe that that is being reversed as the surge succeeds, and I think that the Iranians are very possibly going to step up their assistance to the Jihadists, because they don't want us to succeed in Iraq.... Osama Bin Laden has said that the central front in the battleground is Iraq, and their Palestinian brothers are next. So what are the implications to the State of Israel if they prevail on Iraq? I think they're very obvious." [...]
On the domestic front, I praised the senator in his call for energy independence, but pointed out that every president since Richard Nixon has issued the same call. Why would he succeed?

"Because I believe I can inspire the American people," he said, "and I think that when the price of oil went over $100 a barrel that there was certainly a psychological barrier there."

Whole thing here; link via LA Observed. I'll be on The Charles Goyette Show on Phoenix's KFNX, 1100 on your AM dial, starting in a few minutes here at 10:05 EDT.

This Would Have Made Those Shitty Sgt. Rock Comics a Lot More Interesting...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:10:00 EDT

...and it would have rendered moot the drama behind the pop ballad "Billy Don't Be a Hero." But the times they are a-changin':

In a historic but little-noticed change in policy, the Army is allowing scores of husband-and-wife soldiers to live and sleep together in the war zone - a move aimed at preserving marriages, boosting morale and perhaps bolstering re-enlistment rates at a time when the military is struggling to fill its ranks five years into the fighting.
"It makes a lot of things easier," said Frazier, 33, a helicopter maintenance supervisor in the 3rd Infantry Division. "It really adds a lot of stress, being separated. Now you can sit face-to-face and try to work out things and comfort each other."
Long-standing Army rules barred soldiers of the opposite sex from sharing sleeping quarters in war zones. Even married troops lived only in all-male or all-female quarters and had no private living space.
But in May 2006, Army commanders in Iraq, with little fanfare, decided that it is in the military's interest to promote wedded bliss. In other words: What God has joined together, let no manual put asunder.
"It's better for the soldiers, which means overall it's better for the Army," said Command Sgt. Maj. Mark Thornton of the 3rd Infantry.

More here.

Government Puzzled by Iraq Situation, Seeks Conspiracy Theories

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:07:00 EDT

From a Washington Post report today on the surging violence in Iraq:

As President Bush told an Ohio audience that Iraq was returning to "normalcy," administration officials in Washington held meetings to assess what appeared to be a rapidly deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country.

Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials. With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that "we can't quite decipher" what is going on. It's a question, he said, of "who's got the best conspiracy" theory about why Maliki decided to act now.

4,000 U.S. Dead in Iraq

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:24:00 EDT

The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 4,000 after four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, a grim milestone that is likely to fuel calls for the withdrawal of American forces as the war enters its sixth year.
The American deaths occurred Sunday, the same day rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad and a wave of attacks left at least 61 Iraqis dead nationwide.
An Iraqi military spokesman said Monday that troops had found rocket launching pads in different areas in predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad that had been used by extremists to fire on the Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi government headquarters.
"We hope to deal with this issue professionally to avoid civilian casualties," said spokesman Qassim al-Moussawi.

More here.

Iraq at Five Years

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:17:00 EDT

Editor's Note: With the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq upon us, reason staffers look at where they were when the shooting began in 2003—and where they are now. In 2006, reason published an "Iraq Progress Report," in which "advocates for liberty weigh in after three years" and the June 2006 cover story featured three views on "'Mission Accomplished,' Three Years Later." For an archive of reason's Iraq coverage, go here.

Radley Balko, Senior Editor:

In the lead-up to the war, I was suspicious of the Bush administration's assessment of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, dubious that the federal government is capable of building a liberal society in Iraq from scratch, and in general opposed to the idea of attacking a country that had no discernible ties to the September 11 attacks. Like most people, my positions were based on the assumption that there were actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That we now know there weren't only makes the decision to go to war more regrettable. My position hasn't changed at all.
As for what we should do now, I really can't see any option other than a plan to withdraw troops as soon as possible. Yes, it will be disastrous. But it seems to me this is a pill we're either going to have to swallow now or later, the difference being that swallowing it later will only mean more U.S. casualties in the meantime. We can't pay the Sunnis not to attack us forever (or maybe we can, but we shouldn't). The New York Times mentioned a striking figure in an editorial the other day. For all the talk about pork barrel spending, the total amount of federal spending in all congressional earmarks combined would fund the war in Iraq for about two months. This has been a colossal waste of blood, treasure, and global goodwill.
It's worth noting that it was the crazy, wild-eyed libertarian foreign policy experts who predicted what would happen in Iraq almost to the letter. Yet for reasons that escape me, the neoconservatives who got everything so massively wrong are still taken seriously, and get huge platforms from which to denigrate opponents of the war as "unserious."

Nick Gillespie, Editor, reason.tv and reason online:

After almost 4,000 U.S. deaths, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and trillions of dollars poured into the desert sands, Americans have gone from "shock and awe" to something approaching "Aw, shucks." According to data from the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank often credited with providing intellectual grounding for the Iraq War, 59 percent of Americans say the war was a mistake and 60 percent want a timetable for pulling troops out. Given a similar percentage favored invading Iraq in the spring of 2003, that just might be too little, too late.
I was never in favor of invading Iraq, which I thought was a bait and switch from the 9/11 attacks engineered by a Bush administration whose "War on Terror" had run out of steam given its inability to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice. When U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein (a man who makes me want to believe in hell, just so he can get what he deserves for all eternity), the Americans hubristically pulled a page from the playbook of Shelley's overreaching Ozymandias, and replaced one "colossal wreck" of a regime with another. It's incredibly dispiriting how arrogant and stupid the U.S. forces were when it came to losing the peace, but really, more of us should have seen it coming.
The question I worry about is what American foreign policy will look like five years hence. I'm not a pacifist, and I don't think that military intervention is always a bad thing (ideally, it should be used like Astroglide: sparingly and after a lot of foreplay). But I don't think we've learned very much as a country from the Iraq mess, other than not to rely too much on retreads from the Ford administration to call the shots. I certainly don't think John McCain, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, much less their advisors, have learned much from recent mistakes. Some of them are more ready to bow down to popular opinion but really, that's no way to conduct foreign policy. As a country, we're still a long way away from even starting a conversation that will yield a post-Cold War consensus on how the U.S. should act as a military power. That's not just a bad thing, it really dishonors those who have sacrificed life and limb over the past five years.

Kerry Howley, Senior Editor:

I don't remember where I was when the war started, or when the war turned one, or two, or three, or four. I was in college for the flashy beginning, in Burma for much of the following two years, where the war presented itself as a daily collage of gruesome black and white pictures in the junta's state press. The quality of the print was so bad that many of the pictures just looked smudged. You had to look for the black spaces, and imagine blood.
When I came back, the war was as it is now-hard to imagine and easy to ignore. Every liberty lost here is an abstraction. I have only the vaguest idea of what Nisour Square looks like; my image of Fallujah consists of charred bodies hanging from a single bridge. I can't fathom what it means for a collective to have lost 100,000 people prematurely, or for a state to waste $2 trillion it does not have. Few people I know have ventured out of the Green Zone, and no one I know has been hurt. What do I think about the Iraq War as it enters its sixth year? I think it seems tragic and brutal and criminal, and very far away.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, Associate Editor:

In March 2003, I was just a few months out of college and I had already helped start a war.
My first journalism gig was as the pet libertarian at The Weekly Standard, the neocon home base generally credited with nudging the Bush administration into Iraq.
It's quite exciting to inaugurate a war, and we at the Standard were far from alone in feeling the thrill. Like much of the pro-war commentariat, I thought, "Whatever happens, it can't get worse." After all, what's worse than a genocidal dictator filling mass graves and stockpiling nukes in the volatile Middle East? (Belief in WMDs was robustly bipartisan at the time.) There even seemed to be a decent chance things would get a whole lot better-an oasis of freedom in a desert of tyranny and all that. My colleagues at the Standard and I supported the war with the best intentions, something that opponents of the war often lose sight of. We dreamed of a free, friendly Iraq. Better for us, better for Iraqis.
As a libertarian, I could have and should have known better than to think government actors would get things right, since my political philosophy is grounded in the idea that government is uniquely bad at getting anything done cheaply or efficiently. War is too often a classic example of government action creating waste and confusion on a spectacular scale, good intentions or not.
As it turns out, things could get worse—and they did.

Michael C. Moynihan, Associate Editor:

Anniversaries of catastrophic wars are typically moments of ritual self-flagellation. So what, then, was I wrong about, what have I changed my mind about, five years later? Where does one begin. In those years proceeding the 9/11 attacks, one was forced, often by the social obligation of dinner discussions, to wade into the swamp of Middle Eastern politics; to be pro-war or anti-war, regardless of your level of political engagement or knowledge.
Groping at the unfamiliar—which ones are the Sunnis? what is a Kurd, exactly?—the post-9/11 cult of the amateur (myself included) rebelled against the supposedly lazy and corrupt "MSM," and instead offered endless lunkheaded comparisons between 2003 Iraq and 1945 Japan. The insurgency that flowered, many bloggers blithely suggested, had its historical antecedents in the Werewolf Organization, a band of former Nazis that harassed Allied occupiers and quickly melted away. The Iraqis, brutalized by war and dictatorship, were ready to have a go at democracy. Of course, none of this would happen.
The best mirror of my bewilderment and disappointment is George Packer's brilliant book The Assassins Gate, a clear-eyed account of the stupidity and venality of those sent by the Bush administration to mismanage the occupation. As one CPA advisor told me in 2006, Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR) was known inside the green zone as "Kick Back and Relax." And as Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran's noted with wonderment, James K. Haveman Jr., the official put in charge of Iraq's health care system, landed in Baghdad and launched an anti-smoking campaign. I suppose this is something I always knew, just something that I hoped wouldn't be true in this one case, but boy was I wrong in thinking that the U.S. government could ever achieve a level of honesty and competence needed to even try to promote democracy in an undemocratic region.

Jacob Sullum, Senior Editor:

I was against the war before I was even more against it. I never had any doubts that Saddam Hussein was a murderous thug, but I believed he was a deterrable murderous thug. So even when I assumed he had at least some "weapons of mass destruction," I did not think the threat was big and imminent enough to justify the invasion. Now that we know he had none, I'm embarrassed that I gave as much weight as I did to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations. I'm only slightly less embarrassed about my warning that Iraq surely would use its dreaded (but nonexistent) chemical weapons once the U.S. invaded. Here is the truth starting to dawn on me, right after the fall of Baghdad: "Could it be that Iraq never had a significant WMD capability?" I added that it might not matter, since "even before jubilant Iraqis started pouring into the streets, waving improvised flags and tearing down Saddam's statues, ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom' had metamorphosed from a pre-emptive act of self-defense into a humanitarian mission to rescue people from a brutal dictator."
People who supported the war assure me the Bush administration made the argument about fighting terrorism by turning Iraq into a liberal democracy and thereby transforming the Middle East even before the WMDs went missing. My impression during the lead-up to the invasion was that it was all about neutralizing the WMD threat, since Saddam could decide any day to use those weapons against us, either directly or by passing them on to terrorists. If I had believed the aim was to make the world safe through democracy, which I now hear was the idea all along, I would have been even more skeptical, and I think most Americans would have been as well. I doubt that many who supported the war imagined the U.S. would still have such a large presence in Iraq five years later, let alone that it would have to stay indefinitely simply to prevent the chaos unleashed by the invasion from getting even worse.

Jesse Walker, Managing Editor:

In 2003 I thought there was no compelling reason to invade Iraq, even if the country held weapons of mass destruction; that the U.S. would easily topple Saddam Hussein's regime but would run into serious troubles when the occupation began; and that the war would do much more harm than good.
Five years later, I am less likely to concede the possibility that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.

David Weigel, Associate Editor:

Do you remember the pro-war protestors? I was one of them. Five years ago a pack of conservatives at my college planned a "crash" of the final anti-war rally before the start of the war. When the forces of non-intervention set up on the library steps and started speaking, we walked right in front of them, blasting the Saddam Hussein love ballad from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut on a ROTC student's boom box.

I have excuses for all of this. I was 21. My expertise in American interventionism came from watching Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo reports on CNN. I had friends in the Army. I wanted to "free the Iraqi people." The takeaway is that, like millions of people, I was naive and uninformed about the doings in Mesopotamia and I did my little part to enable a catastrophe.

Matt Welch, Editor in Chief, reason magazine:

I was neither for nor against the war when it was launched, though most of the stuff I was worried about ended up coming true (especially "we will create a damned-if-we-do scenario unless we start looking for creative ways to devolve power and responsibility to the rest of the world").
But the mere fact of that ambivalence points to what's changed most about my thinking since then. Until five years ago, the prior three major U.S. interventions -- the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo—each went quite a bit better than the skeptics predicted. In the same way that almost all past U.S. presidents end up looking good in retrospect (to somebody, anyway), while history marches toward a better future, my hunch was that the pattern would hold true to our post-Vietnam wars as well. No more.
Because of the magnetic logic of perpetual interventionism (on both sides of the political aisle); the strategic problem of anti-Americanism, the temptation of inapt historical analogies and the way that power wants to be corrupt, I have gone from a guy who begged for U.S. leadership in a feckless world to stop the slaughter in Sarajevo, to someone whose primary voting motivation is to provide a check on America's expansion of responsibility for the world's affairs.

Michael Young, Contributing Editor, reason; Opinion Page Editor, Lebanon Daily Star:

The assumption that our thoughts should have changed on Iraq is presumptuous. Certainly, the Bush administration's abysmal postwar strategy until the surge last year invites a critical reassessment of what could have been done for the better. But what does not, and should not, is the bottom line of the war: the fact that the United States managed to remove one of the world's worst mass murderers from power, so that today 55 percent of Iraqis believe that their lives are good, according to a recent poll—including 62 percent of Shiites and 73 percent of Kurds.
The thing with conflicts is that they can be like that old joke about the man who swims halfway across the ocean, only to swim back to where he left from because he's tired. Is the U.S. halfway across the ocean of the Iraq war? Would swimming back to the departure point be a pointless waste of expended energy, so that persisting in Iraq would bring more dividends? It's difficult to say. The gross blunder of the administration was to leave such questions without answers. But it is difficult to justify retreat from Iraq a year into tangible signs of progress thanks to the surge.
Those who back an American withdrawal on the grounds that Iraq is already in a state of chaos don't know what they're talking about. The Moloch of uninhibited chaos and carnage would be infinitely worse, as I remember from my own experiences growing up during Lebanon's civil war. For numerous reasons—the fate of the Iraqis after a pullout, Iran's continuing rise as regional superpower, the future of the Kurds, the threat to regional stability—the U.S. has no choice but to stick it out in Iraq. And as the doubts creep in, Americans might want to think back to what Iraq was under Saddam Hussein, who in two decades was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of nearly 1 million people.
So, sorry, but invading Iraq was the right thing to do, even if it could have been done a million times better by a more competent group of people. When I think of Iraq, somehow I have no profound problem slamming George W. Bush's faults while welcoming what he did to the Baath regime—the barbaric, genocidal, thankfully bygone Baath regime.

It's Mea Culpa Time!

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:14:00 EDT

Five years have passed and Slate asks a handful of "liberal hawks" how they "got it wrong." Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, says it's a loaded question, briefly revisits the "dark years" after the invasion, says the tide has turned post-surge, and acknowledges that the invasion tipped the regional power balance towards Iran:

The lesson is stark: If you don't will the means, don't will the end. To this Kantianism, let us add pure homily: Look before you leap. The tragedy of American power in the Middle East, the most critical arena of world politics, is that the United States ended up working as the handmaiden of Iranian ambitions.

By destroying Saddam's armies, the United States flattened the strongest bulwark against Iranian expansion. By empowering the Shiites, it opened the way to an ideological alliance between Najaf and Qum, the two centers of the faith on either side of the Iraq-Iran border. And by entangling itself in an open-ended war in Iraq, the United States squandered precisely those military assets that would have kept Iran in awe. Would the Ahmadinejad regime grasp so boldly for nuclear weapons if U.S. power and credibility were still intact?

Probably not. Recall the vindication the administration felt when, after the invasion, a nervous Libya relinquished its WMD program to Britain and the United States, as Christopher Hitchens mentions in his contribution to the debate. But Joffe has a point; the nuke issue is surely a two-way street. Obviously, a perceived military success terrifies regional dictators, a perceived failure emboldens them.

The brave Iraqi exile Kenan Makiya, instrumental in swaying liberals like George Packer and Paul Berman to support the war, wonders why, after writing a book like The Republic of Fear, he didn't consider the brutalizing effects of Ba'athist dictatorship on the people of Iraq:

But my biggest political sin is that in spite of nearly a quarter of a century of writing about the abuses of the Baath Party, I, and more generally the whole community of Iraqi exiles, grossly underestimated the consequences on a society of 30 years of extreme dictatorship. Iraqis were, it is true, liberated by the U.S. action in 2003; they were not defeated as the German and Japanese peoples had been in 1945. A regime was removed and a people liberated overnight, but it was a people that did not understand what had happened to it or why. Iraqis emerged into the light of day in a daze, having been in a prison or a giant concentration camp, cut off from the rest of the world to a degree that is difficult to imagine if you have not lived among them.

Richard Cohen says he knew that the Bush administration was full of it (of course he did), but he was guided by a utopianism, one informed by having "spent time in the region." He knew, for instance...

"...that Saddam was unconnected to Osama Bin Laden, that Iraqi intelligence had not met with Mohammed Atta in Prague, and that while Iraq once had a nuclear weapons program, it no longer did. That left chemical and biological weapons, and neither represented much of a threat. Gas had been around since Ypres (1915), and biological devices were impractical as weapons of mass destruction, although they remained profoundly scary. So, the only justification left was, really, what the neocons had started with: a war to reorder the Middle East. This had a certain appeal, since the region was unstable, undemocratic, repressive, and downright dangerous. Can it be a coincidence that so many of the so-called liberal hawks had spent time in the region? When it came to getting it right on Iraq, ignorance may indeed have been bliss."

So to be "right" about the war in Iraq, it was important to know very little about the Middle East?

And, as expected, Hitchens hasn't budged at all.

What the Candidates Will Do in Iraq: Special 5th Anniversary Edition

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:49:00 EDT

From ABC News comes a summary of what Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) pledge to do in Iraq if elected president.

The short versions:

McCain: "emphasize his commitment to keeping U.S. troops in the country to secure it."
Obama: "go beyond his plan to pull troops out of Iraq and "outline a strategic vision for our country" to make the United States more secure."
Clinton: "renewed her pledge to begin withdrawing troops within 60 days of becoming president, using her platform to attack both McCain and Obama."

More here.

From surveys collected by the American Enterprise Insititute, a look at current U.S. opinion:

Strong majorities, 59 percent in Gallup's latest survey, say that the war in Iraq was a mistake. Virtually the same percentage of Americans, 60 percent from the same late February 2008 Gallup survey, also say that we should set a timetable for removing troops from Iraq. Policymakers should not jump the gun though. Only a small fraction of Americans—around 20 percent in most polls—support immediate withdrawal.

More here.

Coming later today: reason staffers reflect on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.

Insurgency Economics

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:48:00 EDT

In a depressing front page article in Sunday's New York Times, reporter Richard A. Oppel Jr. outlines the massive amount of money stolen from Iraq's Ministry of Oil and diverted into the hands of the insurgency. The Baiji oil refinery, one military commander tells Oppel, is "the money pit of the insurgency." According to Iraqi officials $50,000 to $100,000 is skimmed from the Baiji facility per day. Revenues are pocketed, oil trucks are stolen, crooked officials are intimidated. It's an interesting, if not entirely predictable, problem. What Oppel also notes—in a related point, but one, I think, that amounts to a buried lede—is that, contrary to administration claims and popular perception, the insurgency isn't made up primarily of jihadist dead-enders, but rather of disaffected Iraqis that find lucrative work in the country's terrorism industry. The evidence presented isn't overwhelming, but it is strengthened by the number of military officials who, on the record, support this view. The relevant paragraphs:

"It has a great deal more to do with the economy than with ideology," said one senior American military official, who said that studies of detainees in American custody found that about three-quarters were not committed to the jihadist ideology. "The vast majority have nothing to do with the caliphate and the central ideology of Al Qaeda."
[...]
Capt. Stephen Wright, who works at the refinery with Captain Da Silva, is concerned about whether there may be unseen problems looming, like the sort of fatigue that ruptured a propane unit in January. "If something happens to this refinery from neglect, you won't have fuel for eight provinces," he said, "and we'll have 6,000 unemployed Sunnis, who are people we definitely don't want unemployed."
[...]
But there are officers in the American military who openly question how much a role jihadism plays in the minds of most people who carry out attacks. As the American occupation has worn on and unemployment has remained high, these officers say the overwhelming motivation of insurgents is the need to earn a paycheck.

Nor do American officers say they believe that insurgent attacks are centrally coordinated. "As far as networked coordination of attacks, we are not seeing that," said a military official familiar with studies on the insurgency. Opposition to the occupation and fear of the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated government and security forces "clearly are important factors in the insurgency," the official said. "But they are being rivaled by the economic factor, the deprivation that exists."

Maj. Kelly Kendrick, operations officer for the First Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division in Salahuddin, estimates that there are no more than 50 hard-core "Al Qaeda" fighters in Salahuddin, a province of 1.3 million people that includes Baiji and the Sunni cities of Samarra and Tikrit.

He said most fighters were seduced not by dreams of a life following Mr. bin Laden, but by a simpler pitch: "Here's $100; go plant this I.E.D."
"Ninety percent of the guys out here who do attacks are just people who want to feed their families," Major Kendrick said.

Full Times article here. For your entertainment, check out Noah Feldman's mind-bogglingly stupid article on sharia law in the Times Magazine. A sample: "Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act."

The Short Goodbye

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:07:00 EDT

There is a passage in Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell, her Pulitzer Prize-winning book on how the United States dealt with genocide throughout the 20th century, worth pondering for what it says about hypocrisy in the formulation of foreign policy. It is also worth pondering for what it tells us about Power herself, an academic who resigned recently as an advisor to Barack Obama after calling his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an exchange with a Scottish newspaper.

Here, Power is writing about Anthony Lake, who in 1970 resigned from the National Security Council in protest against the Nixon administration's expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. A year after his departure, Lake and a colleague published an article describing what they viewed as a problem in the way America shaped its overseas behavior. Power quotes a paragraph from that article in her own chapter on the war in Bosnia, management of which landed in Lake's lap after he became national security advisor to President Bill Clinton in 1993.

In their article, Lake and his colleague argued, "A liberalism attempting to deal with intensely human problems at home abruptly but naturally shifts to abstract concepts when making decisions about events beyond the water's edge. ‘Nations,' ‘interests,' 'influence,' 'prestige,' are all disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end."

Power follows this observation with an admonition. She reminds us that "When Lake and his Democratic colleagues were put to the test"—in other words when Lake was appointed a senior Clinton administration official—"although they were far more attentive to the human suffering in Bosnia, they did not intervene to ameliorate it."

You have to wonder how Lake feels about Power's phrase today, because if Power was an advisor to Obama, Anthony Lake happens to still be one. In reading her criticism, what comes to his mind? That Power, even if what she said was partly justified, went a bit overboard in picking Lake as the exemplar of American lethargy in Bosnia? That she misleadingly depicted him as an armchair moralist, when the fact is he had written his article after years of being "put to the test" at the State Department, and had even interrupted a promising career out of a sense of moral compunction? That Power, though a journalist in the former Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996, was herself perhaps something of an armchair moralist for having distributed stern moral verdicts from a safe perch at Harvard University, where she wrote her book, which included the type of uncompromising verdicts she would later measure and dilute once she had stepped into the pit of political calculation as an Obama confidante?

The dilutions notwithstanding, weeks before her resignation Power had become a lighting rod for criticism directed against Obama. Her outlook on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had provoked the ire of supporters of Israel, amid signs that Obama was having trouble with Jewish voters. Obama's case was not helped any by the unearthing of a comment Power made in 2002, seemingly advocating American military intervention on the Palestinians' behalf. So bizarre was her proposal that Power later told an Israeli reporter, "Even I don't understand it...This makes no sense to me."

Power's self-immolating comment on Clinton was made during a trip to the United Kingdom. She had the good grace to end it all quickly, though another Obama advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, insisted an apology would have been enough. However, Power showed more political acumen than he did. By hanging on, she would have only remained a magnet of controversy, detracting from Obama's homilies, with the likelihood that the campaign would have eventually jettisoned her anyway.

But Power made a much more significant statement in London, one in which she talked about Obama and Iraq. That the Clintonites brought out their knives in response, that what Power said was valuable only as a weapon in the ongoing pursuit of convention delegates, a weapon doubly lethal for being added to her rash attack on Hillary Clinton, showed how incapable the Democrats are of debating Iraq's future in a forthright way.

In an interview with the BBC program HARDtalk, Power was asked about Barack Obama's plan to remove American troops from Iraq. In her response, she described the candidate's tight withdrawal timetable as "a best case scenario," which he would "revisit" once elected. That sliced and diced answer prompted the show's host to inquire whether Obama's commitment to withdraw most soldiers within 16 months was, actually, no commitment at all. Power's reply was revealing:

You can't make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009. He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator. He will rely upon a plan—an operational plan—that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn't have daily access now, as a result of not being the president. So to think—it would be the height of ideology to sort of say, 'Well, I said it, therefore I'm going to impose it on whatever reality greets me.'

Between Power's "monster" quote and her admission that Barack Obama was being less than candid about his intentions in Iraq, suddenly there was too much light shining onto Obama's studied ambiguities. Campaign manager David Plouffe denied there was any change in the candidate's thinking on Iraq, then welcomed Power's exit. Yet Power had not said anything much different than Obama himself. For example, asked in February by Steve Kroft of CBS whether he would stick to his withdrawal timetable even if sectarian violence ensued, Obama had responded: "No, I always reserve, as commander-in-chief, the right to assess the situation."

And that was nothing compared to what Obama said in 2004, the day after his keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Boston. Speaking at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, he had declared: "The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster. It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died...It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective."

Power's sin was to be frank, as the debate over Iraq continues to be distorted by falsehood. What none of the Democratic candidates will admit to, even as they deftly contradict themselves to later justify an about-face, is that there is little prospect of the U.S. leaving Iraq without sectarian conflict ensuing. Allowing this outcome would indeed be the betrayal Obama warned against in Boston, before betraying his rejection of such a betrayal by issuing his promise of a timed pullout that he is again likely to betray.

But thanks to Anthony Lake's 1971 co-authored essay, we now know that the human implications of withdrawal will carry less weight than the withdrawal's bearing on U.S. national interests. And what is the appeal to U.S. interests in Iraq? That Washington cannot afford to leave the country because that would favor Iran, which would interpret an American exit as the long-awaited opening to impose itself as the paramount power in the Persian Gulf, possibly with a nuclear weapons capacity in the coming years.

It's difficult to brand Power a victim, however, because she added to the ambient deceit on Iraq. In an interview with Salon in February, for example, she answered a question as to how the U.S. would get out of Iraq by glutinously suggesting that Washington might have to accept the "idea of sectarian or ethnic relocation if people are in a mixed neighborhood and feel that they'd be safer in a more homogenous neighborhood." She also strongly favored doling out a lot of money—to Iraq's neighbors for having taken in refugees (though Power failed to consider their contribution to the carnage in Iraq) and to internally displaced people.

It was a pitiful response from someone who had written so effectively about how American inaction, even mendaciousness, had allowed mass murder to go on in such places as Nazi-controlled Europe, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda—not to mention Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Yet here Power was with not a word to say about the possibility of mass murder in a post-American Iraq, proposing instead that the U.S. essentially consent to ethnic cleansing. There was nothing in what she told Salon about ignoring "some plan" that Obama had crafted as a candidate. There was nothing about relying on the sound judgment of people on the ground in Iraq. You could almost hear Tony Lake laughing out loud as Power's crystal ball of self-righteousness shattered into a thousand little shards of duplicity and elision.

But we have to hand it to Power that she subsequently blundered into coming clean. We have to hand it to her that she realized that coming clean meant she couldn't last in the Obama campaign. And we have to admit that her BBC comments were about as close to the truth on America's choices in Iraq as we're going to hear from any of the Democratic campaigns.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Who Says the Surge Is Working?

info@reason.com (Terry Michael) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:30:00 EDT

The surge is smirking.

When it comes Iraq, neoconservative true believers have been allowed to set the bar of "success" below ground level. In this, they're aided by media siding with power instead of challenging it, all while congressional Democrats cower in their cloak rooms.

Approaching the fifth anniversary of "mission accomplished," we are a few improvised explosive devices away from the moment a 4,000th young American will die on some desert roadside.

As that new level of tragedy looms, far too many Democrats remain frightened by their "weak-on-defense" Cold War shadows, apparitions raised not just by the no-time-to-surrender bluster of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, but by the neocon-lite faction of the Democratic Party itself.

"Third way" Democrats lost their national security minds somewhere around 1985, when the World War II generation played the role of swing voters. Promoting "progressive internationalism"—interventionism by another name—Beltway-based operatives like those at the Democratic Leadership Council hallucinate a political center of "Reagan Democrats," who in reality disappeared with the Berlin wall. The middle of the electorate is now made up of generally anti-war Baby Boomers, who came of political age in the 1960s and Vietnam.

It's difficult to report on a debate not taking place, especially when an influential rump group of the "opposition" colludes instead of opposes. Except for a few pieces in left-liberal journals and blogs, Democrats have simply allowed neoconservative propagandists to define the terms of what has become a one-sided monologue about "victory," voiced by elective warriors who employed deception about phantom weapons of mass destruction to market a multi-trillion dollar travesty; claimed a paper tiger thug was our enemy, when the real culprits of the 9/11 attacks still hide in caves, not spider holes; imagined Iraqi embrace of pluralistic democracy, in a tribal culture with no indigenous movement for it; and fielded an imperial American occupying force, drawing jihadists to Baghdad while fomenting civil war that raged outside a surreal "Green Zone," as our puppet government dithered.

Instead of making a case against the war, congressional Democrats shift their poll-driven attention to "the economy, stupid." Democrats like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who provided initial anti-war leadership, muzzle themselves with half-hearted statements like one she made on television February 10. "The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time...to bring reconciliation to Iraq. They have not done that." But then, she hastened to add: "The troops have succeeded, God bless them." So which is it, failure or success? Democratic "leaders" try to have it both ways, reminiscent of John Kerry in 2004.

The "liberal" newspapers which could have challenged the surge have used it either to justify their own support for the war, or have averted their eyes. The Washington Post's befuddled neocon editorial page engages in tortuous revisionism, pointing a finger at everyone except itself for failures of the war it helped cheerlead.

The New York Times, theoretically anti-war, fails even to attempt rational argument against the surge's "success," and yields precious column space to an architect of the war and editor of its propaganda organ, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

Taking cues from the neocon play book, cable-babbling correspondents and print reporters ask simple-minded questions of squishy Democrats, phrased something like this one from CNN's Joe Johns at January's Democratic debate in South Carolina: "Now that the surge is succeeding, how are you going to counter John McCain's case for the war?"

So the war rages on. Weak-kneed Democrats fail to stand against it, and Republicans act like the jilted lover in British singer Dido's "White Flag," taking comfort in denial: "I will go down with this ship. I won't throw my hands up in surrender. There'll be no white flag above my door. I'm in love, and always will be."

The neocons will never give up their love affair with a fatal fantasy. And they'll take the rest of us down with their ship, as long as timid Democrats and a compliant press let them.

A former DNC press secretary, Terry Michael directs the non-partisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism and writes opinion at his "libertarian Democrat" blog, terrymichael.net.

Dick Cheney Wins World Fantasy Award

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:55:00 EDT

Not a surprise, but still worth noting:

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

Elsewhere in Reason: I considered the alleged Osama-Saddam entente back in 2003.