OK, so I guess I'm about a week late, but then again, no one really reads my blog anyways so I have a pretty flexible schedule. Regardless, congratulations President Elect Barack Obama. I didn't vote for you, I think many of your policies are wrong, but I think you're a good, honorable person and will be a major improvement over our current president (of course, my last bowel movement would have probably been an improvement).
Given that the election really came down to Obama and McCain, I'm glad Obama won. His vicotry is basically a rejection of the the Iraq War. And while I doubt Obama will start withdrawing our troops from all over the world, I do think he'll at least slowly bring that awful war to a close.
As I stated earlier, his economic policies do make me a bit nervous. Then again, McCain wasn't an improvement. I could barely stand the irony of McCain calling Obama the "redistributionist and chief" a week or so after he voted to pass the $700 billion dollar bailout (the biggest wealth redistribution in American history). Obama is not a socialist by any means, still a new New Deal is definitely not what we need right now. Hopefully he'll keep it within reason. Although with all the problems this country is facing and pressure he's facing, I kinda doubt it. Oh well. Good luck President Obama.
Showing posts with label Iraq War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq War. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Did Osama Bin Laden Win?
The stock market just fell below 9000 for the first time since the 90's after the Dow dropped another 679 points today. The stock market has already fallen almost 40% from its all time high of 14164 in October 9th of 2007 and will probably continue to fall. Huge banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers have failed along with insurance giants like AIG. Mortgage foreclosures are up, inflation is up and Americans still save less than 0% of their income. That brilliant $700 billion dollar bailout package doesn't seem to be having its desired effect.
All of this was predictable and I take little pride in the fact I predicted it given how obvious it was (and how bad it could get). Economics is an extremely complicated discipline, but the basics are pretty simple. You cannot dramatically lower taxes, dramatically increase spending (Medicare expansion, No Child Left Behind, Department of Homeland Security, etc.) and start two wars with out bankrupting your country. Our government is worse than a teenage girl with her parent's credit card.
What makes this even worse is that not only did we do it to ourselves, but we fell right into our enemy's plan. We executed it to a T. Osama Bin Laden knew very well he couldn't defeat the United States militarily. What he did know is that he could get us stuck in the Middle East crapping money away fighting endless insurgencies. He bled us. And that was his strategy the whole time! He even stated it publicly saying, "So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." He went further and cited Russia, who in the 1980's were bankrupted fighting Bin Laden's insurgents in Afghanistan. Yet we were still too stupid to listen, or at least our politicians were.
So where do we go from here? Well first things first, we have to withdraw our military. Not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from the entire world. The quasi-empire can go! As far as Osama Bin Laden is concerned, he'll lose support if the US leaves the region. Radical Islamists will likely turn on their own government instead of worrying about a bunch of infidels on the other side of the planet. Regardless we have bigger problems at home.
We then need to use the saved money to balance the budget. Right now, we just gave a $700 billion dollar bailout to our major financial institutions, but we have no money and our credit line with China is basically maxed out. So we almost assuredly just printed the cash. This crisis will get much worse if we keep that up, the dollar will just collapse and we'll have runaway inflation during a recession. We need to keep taxes as low as possible for the time being and simply be patient while the market liquidates the bad debt. It will take time and it will hurt, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to pay for your mistakes. And the United States has many mistakes to pay for.
All of this was predictable and I take little pride in the fact I predicted it given how obvious it was (and how bad it could get). Economics is an extremely complicated discipline, but the basics are pretty simple. You cannot dramatically lower taxes, dramatically increase spending (Medicare expansion, No Child Left Behind, Department of Homeland Security, etc.) and start two wars with out bankrupting your country. Our government is worse than a teenage girl with her parent's credit card.
What makes this even worse is that not only did we do it to ourselves, but we fell right into our enemy's plan. We executed it to a T. Osama Bin Laden knew very well he couldn't defeat the United States militarily. What he did know is that he could get us stuck in the Middle East crapping money away fighting endless insurgencies. He bled us. And that was his strategy the whole time! He even stated it publicly saying, "So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." He went further and cited Russia, who in the 1980's were bankrupted fighting Bin Laden's insurgents in Afghanistan. Yet we were still too stupid to listen, or at least our politicians were.
So where do we go from here? Well first things first, we have to withdraw our military. Not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from the entire world. The quasi-empire can go! As far as Osama Bin Laden is concerned, he'll lose support if the US leaves the region. Radical Islamists will likely turn on their own government instead of worrying about a bunch of infidels on the other side of the planet. Regardless we have bigger problems at home.
We then need to use the saved money to balance the budget. Right now, we just gave a $700 billion dollar bailout to our major financial institutions, but we have no money and our credit line with China is basically maxed out. So we almost assuredly just printed the cash. This crisis will get much worse if we keep that up, the dollar will just collapse and we'll have runaway inflation during a recession. We need to keep taxes as low as possible for the time being and simply be patient while the market liquidates the bad debt. It will take time and it will hurt, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to pay for your mistakes. And the United States has many mistakes to pay for.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Is George Bush the Worst President Ever? No, but not for a Lack of Trying
Fewer and fewer people these days would dare say George Bush has been a good president. His approval rating is hovering around 30%, worldwide it is even worse, many staunch Republicans like Chuck Hagel, Gordan Smith, Patrick Buchanan and Bob Barr have turned against him, there have been hundreds of books and documentaries lambasting him, Keith Olbermann and Dennish Kucinich among others demanded he be impeached and even my super conservative roommate is completely fed up with him. I posed this question to him "whenever you think we should do something and then Bush comes out with a similar proposal, does it make you question your assumptions?" His answer: an emphatic "yes!"
Bush has certainly been bad. The wars in Iraq in Afghanistan have so far yielded 4677 deaths and possibly many more suicides as well as countless Iraqi casualties. The reasons for the Iraq war turned out to all be false. His administration failed to stop 9/11 or catch Osama Bin Laden. His policies have vastly increased the number of terrorists as well, defeating the whole idea of a “war on terrorism.” The deficit has skyrocketed leading to high inflation. The economy is also extremely weak making the possibility of 70's like stagflation uncomfortably high. Government spending has increased quicker under Bush than at any time since the Great Society. Of all the embarrassing things he has said, the most ridiculous was probably his attack on John Kerry in one of the debates for "pretending to be fiscal conservative." Sorry sir, you are pretending to be a fiscal conservative. OK, back to the transgressions; the Patriot Act set fire to the 4th and 6th ammendments of our constitution allowing federal agents to search your home while you are not there, with out a warrant and with out even telling you they were there. The Military Tribunals Act is a direct assault on Habeus Corpus, the water boarding, renditions and other torture scandals, the miserable response to Katrina, the Scooter Libby scandal, and then there was that ridiculous attempt to put retroactive immunity into a funding bill earlier this year. There are plenty more, but you get the idea.
So how could such a dismal track record not ordain Bush Jr. as the worst president ever? Well, when you're competing with our 42 previous presidents, you've got a strong handicap to start with! Richard Nixon comes to mind right away. In my honest opinion, Watergate was about the best thing he did. However, the worst of all time belongs to a guy who inexplicably manages his way into most historians’ top 10 lists : Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson, wait, let me think... oh yeah, World War I, League of Nations, decent president. Well right on the first two, not quite so much on the third. Many historians have called him an "idealist" for the 14 Points he proposed after the conclusion of World War I. The truth is less appealing, for starters, the man was a die hard racist whose favorite film was D.W. Griffith's Klu Klux Klan adoring The Birth of a Nation. And as one might expect from an extreme racist, upon being elected he almost immediately went about segregating the executive branch.
However, being a bad person doesn't necessarily make for a bad president. Ty Cobb was one of the most miserable human beings that ever lived, but he could sure play baseball. Unfortunately, Wilson’s ugly side was more evident in his policies than his character.
We'll start with his economic policies, which were in some ways prescient (being in favor of centralization), but were also disastrous. He brought us both the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax. You can argue that these are legitimate now (I wouldn't), but economists almost universally blame the Federal Reserve for causing the Great Depression. Some, like Milton Friedman blame the Fed for mismanaging the crisis, others like Murray Rothbard blame it for creating it.
Still, all we have is that he was a racist and his economic policies turned out to be disastrous a decade after he left office. No, those reasons alone won’t do the trick. The reason Wilson was the worst president in history was all about World War I.
In 1914, Europe brought upon the world the worst war we had ever seen. The American people were almost unanimous in wanting to stay neutral. Wilson played lip service to this sentiment, even using the line "he kept us out of the war" to get reelected in 1916. However, Wilson wanted the US to have a seat at the peace conference. (1) He wanted to "make the world safe for democracy." The only way to do this was to get the United States into the war. In many ways he was the first neoconservative (except they don’t like the whole League of Nations idea).
To do this he’d need a reason though. Many believe today the cassus belli for the United States to enter World War I was when 128 Americans died after the Luisitania was sunk on May 7th, 1915. However it was actually two years later when almost simultaneously Germany foolishly sent the Zimmerman telegram to Mexico (who was in the middle of a civil war) recommending they retake Texas and reopened unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson decided this was unacceptable and asked the congress to declare war on Germany (which they actually did back then).
However these were ridiculous reasons on their face. The Zimmerman telegram was bad, but basically meaningless given Mexico’s state of affairs. And was losing a few ships worth hundreds of thousands of American lives? Wouldn’t going to war require more ships to go through dangerous waters? Furthermore, it was blatant hypocrisy. Wilson had no problem with the almost identical policy Britain had in blockading (and starving) Germany.
Wilson went ahead regardless though, and to gain public support for the war he launched the first propaganda ministry in the history of the United States. He set up the War Industries Board that could only be described as fascist. Its job was to control the prices businesses charged, ration resources and bully anyone who resisted into compliance. He censored newspapers, jailed dissidents, initiated the first draft since the Civil War and sent over 4 million Americans to the muddy, rant infested trenches on the Western Front. 117,000 would not return. (2).
Yet somehow it got worse as soldiers returning home brought with them the Spanish flu, which killed another 675,000 Americans. And if all this were not bad enough, his “idealism” failed in every way possible. The 14 Points predictably broke down as the Allies wanted revenge for the brutal four-year war. The League of Nations was all he got through, which the United States didn’t even join. In the end, what Wilson claimed was the “war to end all wars” was only that for 20 years when we were blessed with World War II (the war to end that theory). Unfortunately the peace treaty Wilson wanted so much to be apart of, the vicious Treaty of Versailles, had a lot to do with the Nazi’s coming to power (along with the Great Depression the Federal Reserve helped create).
If the United States had stayed out of World War I, it is certainly possible that the First World War would have ended in a bitter stalemate, which neither side would have wanted to repeat. Instead, one side was humiliated and forced to pay massive reparations. The Nazis capitalized on the discontent the Treaty of Versailles brought as well as Germany’s economic woes to come to power in 1933. While we can never know for sure, it’s certainly plausible that if the United States had stayed out of World War I, we would have never heard the name of Adolf Hitler. Jim Powell strongly defends this argument in his book Wilson’s War. It’s not to say World War II and the Holocaust were Wilson’s fault, but the unintended consequences of his reckless actions should be lessons for everyone today. And it’s still safe to blame him for the 117,000 dead Americans as well as the horrible precedents he set. Afterall, he was the first one that foolishly thought the United States should be the world’s policeman.
So while George Bush has certainly been bad, Woodrow Wilson still has him beat in my book. Luckily for George W, he’s got six months left to screw things up even further. Good luck George.
(1) Tom Woods, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Pg. 123-124, Regnery Publishing, Copyright 2004
(2) Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, Pg. 108-113, Random House Inc., Copyright 2007
Bush has certainly been bad. The wars in Iraq in Afghanistan have so far yielded 4677 deaths and possibly many more suicides as well as countless Iraqi casualties. The reasons for the Iraq war turned out to all be false. His administration failed to stop 9/11 or catch Osama Bin Laden. His policies have vastly increased the number of terrorists as well, defeating the whole idea of a “war on terrorism.” The deficit has skyrocketed leading to high inflation. The economy is also extremely weak making the possibility of 70's like stagflation uncomfortably high. Government spending has increased quicker under Bush than at any time since the Great Society. Of all the embarrassing things he has said, the most ridiculous was probably his attack on John Kerry in one of the debates for "pretending to be fiscal conservative." Sorry sir, you are pretending to be a fiscal conservative. OK, back to the transgressions; the Patriot Act set fire to the 4th and 6th ammendments of our constitution allowing federal agents to search your home while you are not there, with out a warrant and with out even telling you they were there. The Military Tribunals Act is a direct assault on Habeus Corpus, the water boarding, renditions and other torture scandals, the miserable response to Katrina, the Scooter Libby scandal, and then there was that ridiculous attempt to put retroactive immunity into a funding bill earlier this year. There are plenty more, but you get the idea.
So how could such a dismal track record not ordain Bush Jr. as the worst president ever? Well, when you're competing with our 42 previous presidents, you've got a strong handicap to start with! Richard Nixon comes to mind right away. In my honest opinion, Watergate was about the best thing he did. However, the worst of all time belongs to a guy who inexplicably manages his way into most historians’ top 10 lists : Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson, wait, let me think... oh yeah, World War I, League of Nations, decent president. Well right on the first two, not quite so much on the third. Many historians have called him an "idealist" for the 14 Points he proposed after the conclusion of World War I. The truth is less appealing, for starters, the man was a die hard racist whose favorite film was D.W. Griffith's Klu Klux Klan adoring The Birth of a Nation. And as one might expect from an extreme racist, upon being elected he almost immediately went about segregating the executive branch.
However, being a bad person doesn't necessarily make for a bad president. Ty Cobb was one of the most miserable human beings that ever lived, but he could sure play baseball. Unfortunately, Wilson’s ugly side was more evident in his policies than his character.
We'll start with his economic policies, which were in some ways prescient (being in favor of centralization), but were also disastrous. He brought us both the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax. You can argue that these are legitimate now (I wouldn't), but economists almost universally blame the Federal Reserve for causing the Great Depression. Some, like Milton Friedman blame the Fed for mismanaging the crisis, others like Murray Rothbard blame it for creating it.
Still, all we have is that he was a racist and his economic policies turned out to be disastrous a decade after he left office. No, those reasons alone won’t do the trick. The reason Wilson was the worst president in history was all about World War I.
In 1914, Europe brought upon the world the worst war we had ever seen. The American people were almost unanimous in wanting to stay neutral. Wilson played lip service to this sentiment, even using the line "he kept us out of the war" to get reelected in 1916. However, Wilson wanted the US to have a seat at the peace conference. (1) He wanted to "make the world safe for democracy." The only way to do this was to get the United States into the war. In many ways he was the first neoconservative (except they don’t like the whole League of Nations idea).
To do this he’d need a reason though. Many believe today the cassus belli for the United States to enter World War I was when 128 Americans died after the Luisitania was sunk on May 7th, 1915. However it was actually two years later when almost simultaneously Germany foolishly sent the Zimmerman telegram to Mexico (who was in the middle of a civil war) recommending they retake Texas and reopened unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson decided this was unacceptable and asked the congress to declare war on Germany (which they actually did back then).
However these were ridiculous reasons on their face. The Zimmerman telegram was bad, but basically meaningless given Mexico’s state of affairs. And was losing a few ships worth hundreds of thousands of American lives? Wouldn’t going to war require more ships to go through dangerous waters? Furthermore, it was blatant hypocrisy. Wilson had no problem with the almost identical policy Britain had in blockading (and starving) Germany.
Wilson went ahead regardless though, and to gain public support for the war he launched the first propaganda ministry in the history of the United States. He set up the War Industries Board that could only be described as fascist. Its job was to control the prices businesses charged, ration resources and bully anyone who resisted into compliance. He censored newspapers, jailed dissidents, initiated the first draft since the Civil War and sent over 4 million Americans to the muddy, rant infested trenches on the Western Front. 117,000 would not return. (2).
Yet somehow it got worse as soldiers returning home brought with them the Spanish flu, which killed another 675,000 Americans. And if all this were not bad enough, his “idealism” failed in every way possible. The 14 Points predictably broke down as the Allies wanted revenge for the brutal four-year war. The League of Nations was all he got through, which the United States didn’t even join. In the end, what Wilson claimed was the “war to end all wars” was only that for 20 years when we were blessed with World War II (the war to end that theory). Unfortunately the peace treaty Wilson wanted so much to be apart of, the vicious Treaty of Versailles, had a lot to do with the Nazi’s coming to power (along with the Great Depression the Federal Reserve helped create).
If the United States had stayed out of World War I, it is certainly possible that the First World War would have ended in a bitter stalemate, which neither side would have wanted to repeat. Instead, one side was humiliated and forced to pay massive reparations. The Nazis capitalized on the discontent the Treaty of Versailles brought as well as Germany’s economic woes to come to power in 1933. While we can never know for sure, it’s certainly plausible that if the United States had stayed out of World War I, we would have never heard the name of Adolf Hitler. Jim Powell strongly defends this argument in his book Wilson’s War. It’s not to say World War II and the Holocaust were Wilson’s fault, but the unintended consequences of his reckless actions should be lessons for everyone today. And it’s still safe to blame him for the 117,000 dead Americans as well as the horrible precedents he set. Afterall, he was the first one that foolishly thought the United States should be the world’s policeman.
So while George Bush has certainly been bad, Woodrow Wilson still has him beat in my book. Luckily for George W, he’s got six months left to screw things up even further. Good luck George.
(1) Tom Woods, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Pg. 123-124, Regnery Publishing, Copyright 2004
(2) Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, Pg. 108-113, Random House Inc., Copyright 2007
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The Real Death Toll in Iraq
Alright, it's time to get a bit more serious than Brett Favre, much more serious. As of July 14th, 2008, 4119 American soldiers and 314 troops from other nations in the "coalition of the willing" have been killed in Iraq since the war started on March 20th, 2003. An additional 30,349 have been wounded although some estimates put the real number closer to 100,000.
Yet as awful as those stastics are, they are really much worse. According to CBS, in 2005 alone 6256 American soldiers and veterans commited suicide! This shouldn't be that shocking giving the revelations in 2007 of the cockroach infested building 18 at Walter Reed as well as the well documented effects of post traumatic stress syndrome. Nonetheless, it's just as horrifying.
What makes an accurate estimation of the number of suicides among our veterans even more difficult is that CBS had to fight tooth and nail to get this information and to my knowledge hasn't been able to get information for 2004, 2006, 2007 and so far in 2008. This is nothing new for the Pentagon, they typically won't even let the media see the coffins of those killed in action. Still, it would probably be safe to assume that the epidemic is even more widespread today as soldiers are serving a third and fourth tour as well as longer tours.
However, I will be generous in trying to extrapolate a rough estimate and use the 6256 suicides as a baseline for each year. We can then look at what the suicide rate should have been among the armed forces by looking at the national average. There are surely many demographic differences that should be accounted for, but I'm just looking for a rough estimate. In 2005, 32,637 people committed suicide in the United States, or about 0.0011%, although among males it was about 0.0017%. Since the military is predominantly male, let’s use the 0.0017% to find what should be the average (1). While the suicides are predominantly among veterans that served in Iraq, the data obtained by CBS are suicides among the armed forces, so I will use that total. Since most of the armed forces have not seen combat in Iraq, again I'm being generous. Regardless, there are currently 1,380,028 men and women in the military (2), so there should be about 2346 suicides per year. The difference between 6256 and 2346 is 3910. I think it is reasonable to attribute the increased suicides to the war, which has been going on for about 5 1/4 years. So 3910 X 5.25 = 20,528 estimated suicides attributable to the war since it began! Add that to the 4119 soldiers who were killed in action and we arrive at a grand total of 24,647 deaths.
Again this can not be verified given the information I have access to and a much more thorough study would have to be taken to come up with a more supportable number. However, this is a story that has barely made it into the public and needs to be reported on more, although I should give credit to CBS who did a story on it back in November.
We must also not forget the huge cost for the citizens of Iraq. The official number of Iraqi dead is around 93,778 and probably much higher. According the Opinion Research Business the number could be over a million! Many more have been forced to leave the country, the infrastructure is still heavily damaged and the nation is stuck amidst terrible ethnic strife. It's nice that a tyrant like Saddam Hussein is gone, but with no WMD, no connection to Al Qaeda, and the enormous human and financial cost, if we haven't yet done it, it's time to admit we made a horrible, horrible mistake.
(1) U.S.A. Suicide: 2005 Official Final Data, American Association of Suicidology, http://www.suicidology.org/
(2) Active Duty Military Personnel by Rank/Grade, Department of Defense, August 31, 2007, http://www.defenselink.mil/
Yet as awful as those stastics are, they are really much worse. According to CBS, in 2005 alone 6256 American soldiers and veterans commited suicide! This shouldn't be that shocking giving the revelations in 2007 of the cockroach infested building 18 at Walter Reed as well as the well documented effects of post traumatic stress syndrome. Nonetheless, it's just as horrifying.
What makes an accurate estimation of the number of suicides among our veterans even more difficult is that CBS had to fight tooth and nail to get this information and to my knowledge hasn't been able to get information for 2004, 2006, 2007 and so far in 2008. This is nothing new for the Pentagon, they typically won't even let the media see the coffins of those killed in action. Still, it would probably be safe to assume that the epidemic is even more widespread today as soldiers are serving a third and fourth tour as well as longer tours.
However, I will be generous in trying to extrapolate a rough estimate and use the 6256 suicides as a baseline for each year. We can then look at what the suicide rate should have been among the armed forces by looking at the national average. There are surely many demographic differences that should be accounted for, but I'm just looking for a rough estimate. In 2005, 32,637 people committed suicide in the United States, or about 0.0011%, although among males it was about 0.0017%. Since the military is predominantly male, let’s use the 0.0017% to find what should be the average (1). While the suicides are predominantly among veterans that served in Iraq, the data obtained by CBS are suicides among the armed forces, so I will use that total. Since most of the armed forces have not seen combat in Iraq, again I'm being generous. Regardless, there are currently 1,380,028 men and women in the military (2), so there should be about 2346 suicides per year. The difference between 6256 and 2346 is 3910. I think it is reasonable to attribute the increased suicides to the war, which has been going on for about 5 1/4 years. So 3910 X 5.25 = 20,528 estimated suicides attributable to the war since it began! Add that to the 4119 soldiers who were killed in action and we arrive at a grand total of 24,647 deaths.
Again this can not be verified given the information I have access to and a much more thorough study would have to be taken to come up with a more supportable number. However, this is a story that has barely made it into the public and needs to be reported on more, although I should give credit to CBS who did a story on it back in November.
We must also not forget the huge cost for the citizens of Iraq. The official number of Iraqi dead is around 93,778 and probably much higher. According the Opinion Research Business the number could be over a million! Many more have been forced to leave the country, the infrastructure is still heavily damaged and the nation is stuck amidst terrible ethnic strife. It's nice that a tyrant like Saddam Hussein is gone, but with no WMD, no connection to Al Qaeda, and the enormous human and financial cost, if we haven't yet done it, it's time to admit we made a horrible, horrible mistake.
(1) U.S.A. Suicide: 2005 Official Final Data, American Association of Suicidology, http://www.suicidology.org/
(2) Active Duty Military Personnel by Rank/Grade, Department of Defense, August 31, 2007, http://www.defenselink.mil/
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