Paul Krugman: Time to Leave

Krugman delves into politics this week and concludes that Representative John Murtha is right:

Time to Leave, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: ...Representative John Murtha's speech calling for a quick departure from Iraq was full of passion, but it was also serious and specific in a way rarely seen on the other side of the debate. President Bush and his apologists speak in vague generalities about staying the course... But Mr. Murtha spoke of mounting casualties and lagging recruiting, the rising frequency of insurgent attacks, stagnant oil production and lack of clean water. Mr. Murtha - a much-decorated veteran who cares deeply about America's fighting men and women - argued that our presence in Iraq is making things worse, not better. Meanwhile, the war is destroying the military he loves. ... I'd add that the war is also destroying America's moral authority. When Mr. Bush speaks of human rights, the world thinks of Abu Ghraib. ... When administration officials talk of spreading freedom, the world thinks about ... much of Iraq ... ruled by theocrats and their militias. Some administration officials accused Mr. Murtha of undermining the troops and giving comfort to the enemy. But that sort of thing no longer works, now that the administration has lost the public's trust.

Instead, defenders of our current policy have had to make a substantive argument: we can't leave Iraq now, because a civil war will break out... But the real question is ... When, exactly, would be a good time to leave Iraq? ...[W]e're not going to stay in Iraq until we achieve victory, ... At most, we'll stay until the American military can take no more. Mr. Bush never asked the nation for the sacrifices - higher taxes, a bigger military and, possibly, a revived draft - that might have made a long-term commitment ... possible. Instead, the war has been fought on borrowed money and borrowed time. And time is running out. With some military units on their third tour of duty..., the superb volunteer army that Mr. Bush inherited is in increasing danger of ... collapse in quality and morale similar to the collapse of the officer corps in the early 1970's. So the question isn't whether things will be ugly after American forces leave Iraq. They probably will. The question... is whether it makes sense to keep the war going for another year or two, which is all the time we realistically have. ... And there's a good case to be made that our departure will actually improve matters. As Mr. Murtha pointed out..., the insurgency derives much of its support from the perception that it's resisting a foreign occupier. Once we're gone, the odds are that Iraqis, who don't have a tradition of religious extremism, will turn on fanatical foreigners like Zarqawi.

The only way to justify staying in Iraq is to make the case that stretching the U.S. army to its breaking point will buy time for something good to happen. I don't think you can make that case convincingly. So Mr. Murtha is right: it's time to leave.

Previous (11/18) column: Paul Krugman: A Private Obsession
Next (11/25) column: Paul Krugman: Bad for the Country

Comments

[calmo]

So right. Kind of like hearing a trumpet sound for the first time after so many pitiful plugs at it.
So that's what it means to speak your mind.
Thank you Mr Murtha.

[anne]

Thank you.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/17/politics/17text-murtha.html

November 17, 2005

Murtha Calls for a 'Change in Direction'

The following is the transcript of the news conference Thursday by Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, as provided by Federal News Service.

REP. MURTHA: I just spoke to the Democratic Caucus and told them my feelings about the war. And I started out by saying the war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It's a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of the members of Congress.

The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq. But it's time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region....

[ilsm]

The limits of military "power".

Krugman is right, the pentagon wrong.

We must remember, as in Vietnam, you do not take a World War Two imitation of the Wehrmacht, replete with all kinds of new expensive garbage, to fight an insurgency the foundation of which you have no knowledge of.

Bush and cpmpany are wrong! The situation is Iraq will be no better in a year, two or ten.................

[save_the_rustbelt]

Although I agree with Krugman........

Last week he was a healthcare expert.

This week he is a military expert.

What next week?

[jill]

“Hawkish” Murtha Urged Cut & Run from Somalia, Too

Rep. John Murtha was for cutting and running before he was for cutting and running:

After terrorists attacked U.S. troops in Mogadishu, Somalia 12 years ago, anti-Iraq war Democrat, Rep. John Murtha urged then-President Clinton to begin a complete pullout of U.S. troops from the region.
Clinton took the advice and ordered the withdrawal - a decision that Osama bin Laden would later credit with emboldening his terrorist fighters and encouraging him to mount further attacks against the U.S.

“Our welcome has been worn out,” Rep Murtha told NBC’s “Today” show in Sept. 1993, after the Mogadishu battle cost the lives of 18 U.S. Rangers.

The Pennsylvania Democrat announced that President Clinton had been “listening to our suggestions. And I think you’ll see him move those troops out very quickly.”

…

In a 1998 interview with ABC’s John Miller, Osama bin Laden said that America’s withdrawal from Somalia had emboldened his burgeoning al Qaida force and encouraged him to plan new attacks.

“Our people realize[d] more than before that the American soldier is a paper tiger that run[s] in defeat after a few blows,” the terror chief recalled. “America forgot all about the hoopla and media propaganda and left dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.”

[Jack]

STill amazes me... not even Krugman so much as mentions oil, which is the reason we CANNOT leave. Our country is seriously addicted, and repubs and demos are in deep denial.

[calmo]

Save asks us to question whether it is possible to be an expert in more than one thing.
This is my specialty S. This is the very air I breathe. If it weren't for questions like yours, I would perish. [Worse: I might have to cancel my cable subscription.]
Such a tasty morsel, where to begin? With 'expert' of course --even the novices know that is the place to start.
They just know ("intuitively", if you are a housewife; "empirically", if you have a housewife; "a priori", if you have taken a philosophy course and want to stun others with your spectacular knowledge).
They know it has little to do with Krugman, a mere coincidence. [Nay, even less: an instance of a coincidence.]
If you are an expert in these matters, it is patently obvious that you are a numbskull in others.

[dave iverson]

Jim Kunstler hits the "oil" nail on the head in his follow-up comments re: Murtha, titled "Stay or Go?" at http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2005/11/stay_or_go.html

Kunstler:

"...it would be nice if we could have a coherent public discussion about staying or going in Iraq, and you can't do that without talking about the oil of the Middle East.

"But it does illustrate how deep the national denial runs and how foggy the debate gets. ...

"Maybe we ought to ask: what happens to the oil supply of the Crusader West when none of its representatives maintains a garrison in the Middle East? I use the term Crusader not to be cute, but to remind you how Europe and America are viewed by many people of the Middle East. They don't like us. They have a longstanding beef with us. Some of them would like to punish us.

"America is leading the current crusade because we are the society most desperately addicted to oil,...."

[ken melvin]

I believe in the great god of chaos and that Cindy Sheehan, Howard Dean and John Murtha are beautiful butterflies.

[ilsm]

Jill,

Why do you think bin Laden said our tactical withdrawl from Somalia emboldened his "forces"? Where is bin Laden now? Driving a cab in Washington DC?

bin Laden was baiting the US into getting in to a quagmire to his liking.

bin Laden wanted more Blackhawks down.

When Clinton acted in our own best interest and removed our troops from a quagmire we knew nothing about nor could do anything for, he did the right thing.

You would have US soldiers die to appease bin Laden's desire to kill them?

Our kids are much easier to kill in Iraq/Somaliaand make better recruiting than sending his people here to die.

The executive has to have a plan, which Bush has not, a budget of what it is going to cost and then a feedback mechanism. This administration has none of that.

The cost benefit is to get out.

Oil is a mercantile thing as much as the anti Israel lobby wishes it were otherwise. The Iranian Islamic Republic is selling to the western crusaders as profitably as their less Islamic friends.

[Fred Hapgood]

> STill amazes me... not even Krugman so much as
> mentions oil, which is the reason we CANNOT leave.
> Our country is seriously addicted, and repubs and
> demos are in deep denial.

I never understood this argument. Oil is a totally globalized commodity. It is a single virtual pool that is owned by noone specific and bought by noone specific. It wouldn't matter if Jeb Bush owned Iraq, the price of oil would still be set by the world market, period. If Osama bin Laden owned Iraq there would be no way he could prevent Iraqi oil from powering American cars, short of refusing to sell any oil to anyone at all.

Whatever the arguments for invading Iraq might or might not have been, no one who understands how the world oil economy works would think for a second of adding the control of oil to that list, and if there is one thing that this White House knows, it is how oil is bought and sold.

[calmo]

Where is bin Laden now? Driving a cab in Washington DC?
Is this retro-personification helpful ilsm?
Do we need to entertain Jill who thinks she/he can run the swiftboats again? The VP is still not able to counter Murtha's charge in public. Squeaking like a mouse from the safe confines of the (right wing stink tank) AEI, he trys to put across a message of "responsibility".
Pitiful.
Wasn't it just last week that the AEI entertained Ahmed Chalabi, the catalyst for American cake walks in Iraq? Wasn't it Jordan that asked to have him detained on the matter of several hundred Million dollars that went missing? The national press is not part of my Thanksgiving.

[slink]

dearest fred
there are more aspects to oil then pumping rates
please be assured the trans nat energy companies like" friendly " oil regimes and they like a gun or two handy when their staring down " competitors"
over say
"access " to
central asian reserves

[ilsm]

Calmo,

No I was being a little tough on Jill.

I had a conversation today about this war and reminisced about a time I spent on an Air Base in 71.

The loaded to the brim stake bed trucks used to carry empty steel coffins from the aerial port to the mortuaries after regular hours so only a few of us saw those wrenching things moved about.

[anne]

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/1010-24.htm

October 10, 2005

The Labyrinth of Iraq
By James Carroll - Boston Globe

THE ANCIENT myth has it that a person entering the maze will never find the way out. As if that were not terrifying enough, inside the maze lives the beast whose special appetite is for the young. The maze is a cluster of tricks, paths to nowhere, the realm of dead ends. There is no escape. The young must fear being eaten alive, but an eternity of false exits threatens everyone.

The maze is a daunting metaphor, an image of psychological imprisonment. At night, the dream of the maze comes to every sleeper, involving movement through a string of corridors that lead only into other corridors. Humans can be afraid even in the absence of the thing that kills. Not getting out can be terrifying enough. Dreams in which the monster actually appears, with child's blood on its teeth, have a simpler function -- to awaken the knowledge that the future itself can be at risk.

For ancient Athens, the maze was on the island of Crete, and the monster was the Minotaur. For America, the maze is in Iraq, and the monster is labeled ''insurgency." This is no myth, no metaphor, no dream. The war is America's prison. Our politics are paralyzed now because no one can imagine the way out. Youthful GIs and Marines hustle from one dead end to another, from the false exit of Iraqi ''sovereignty" to the trap door of the constitutional vote to the trick mirror of Iraqi armed forces that can take over ''security." This string of exitless corridors leads our troops ever deeper into the maze, more at the mercy of the devouring monster than ever.

Just as Athens sent its boys and girls to feed the Minotaur, keeping the beast appeased and far away, so -- just so -- does Washington. But in our circumstance, the sacrificial offering of the young is not quite working. Here is the ironic surprise that only recently dawns on the United States: We have followed our young ones into the maze. We are a lost nation, right behind them.

Iraq is far away, but its maze transcends locality. US foreign policy is the maze now; so is the evening news, and so are the pages of the newspapers that arrive each morning. We sit at our breakfast tables wide awake, yet the feeling of dreams is over everything. The corridors of American consciousness open only into other corridors. We hustle from one threshold to the next, busier than ever, but we never come out. This war was the entrance into a world with no exit. Those who oppose the war and those who support it are alike in feeling a vast demoralization....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/opinion/15herbert.html?ex=1255579200&en=c6d0a53544563b0e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

October 15, 2004

Paralyzed, a Soldier Asks Why
By BOB HERBERT

DALE CITY, Va.

Sunlight was pouring through the doorway to the furnished basement of the neat two-story home on Reardon Lane. The doorway had been widened to accommodate the wheelchair of Army Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson Jr., who was once a star athlete but now, at age 27, spends a lot of time in his parents' basement, watching the large flat-screen TV.

I asked the sergeant whether he ever gets depressed. "No," he said quickly, before adding, "I mean, I could say I was sad for a while. But it didn't really last long."

Sergeant Simpson's expertise is tank warfare. But the Army is stretched thin, and the nation's war plans at times have all the coherence of football plays drawn up in the schoolyard. When Sergeant Simpson's unit was deployed from Germany to Iraq, the tanks were left behind and the sergeant ended up bouncing around Tikrit in a Humvee, on the lookout for weapons smugglers and other vaguely defined "bad guys."

He said he felt more like a cop than a soldier.

One evening last April, Sergeant Simpson was the passenger in the lead vehicle of a four-vehicle convoy on a routine patrol in Tikrit. "It was a little housing area," he said. "We were just there to show a presence."

Iraqi soldiers were in the second vehicle of the convoy.

"I looked back and the Iraqi truck had stopped for some reason," Sergeant Simpson said.

He waved the driver forward, but the truck remained motionless. "That was odd," he said. "They wouldn't follow us....

[dryfly]

Oil is a mercantile thing as much as the anti Israel lobby wishes it were otherwise. The Iranian Islamic Republic is selling to the western crusaders as profitably as their less Islamic friends.

Well as much as I hate this war & this administration... I think Jack is right that it's about oil now.

And while whoever gets control over there will eventually sell to 'the crusaders' after we leave it is going to be quite a while before it settles down enough to start pumping...

Plus there is the REAL possibility that once Iraq is 'stable' that it will become a launching pad for the same kind of insurgency in Arabia... whoever wins there will also eventually sell to us but eventually might take a couple decades without a lot of western stabilizers.

I really think that is the problem... the potential for long term instability.

I think that also explains in part why the right wingers who just a few months ago were chomping at the bit to go after Iran now don't seem to be so upset by an Iranian style Islamic Republic in Iraq...

Any Satan is better than no Satan from an oil executives perspective.

[Fred Hapgood]

> there are more aspects to oil then pumping rates
> please be assured the trans nat energy companies
> like" friendly " oil regimes and they like a gun or
> two handy when their staring down " competitors"

Energy companies don't buy from regimes. They buy from the international market (or draw from their own stocks). The state of mind of any given country selling into that market is irrelevant to them. It's just like stocks. If I buy a share of Google I could care less what the state of mind of the person who sold that share was. Pointing a gun at them is not going to do squat for the price.

Invading Iraq for oil is as plausible as the idea of invading Wall Street to get shares of Google. In either case it shows a fundamental incomprehension of how the industry works.

says...

Stay or go, it matters not. The die has been cast.
Iraq will be a threat to the US for long into the future. Reality has been changed for the worst. We have no way to twist history back into a safer configuration.
Looks like a return to the hyper-vigilant state of the cold war. Thanks a lot.

[jill]

Murtha is your typical politician, nothing more, nothing less. It seems that Murtha steered business to HIS BROTHER'S LOBBYING FIRM - KSA - and helped Nancy Pelosi get a big project for her district which DIRECTLY BENEFITTED A RELATIVE OF HERS.

JUNE 13, 2005 LA TIMES:
"When Congress passed the $417-billion Pentagon spending bill last ear, Rep. John P. Murtha, the top Democrat on the House defense appropriations subcommittee, boasted about the money he secured to create jobs in his Pennsylvania district.

But the bill Murtha helped write also benefited at least 10 companies represented by a lobbying firm where his brother, Robert "Kit" Murtha, is a senior partner, according to disclosure records, interviews and an analysis of the bill by The Times."

ROLL CALL put it this way:
Republican lawmakers say that ties between Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and his brother's lobbying firm, KSA Consulting, may warrant investigation by the House ethics committee...

According to a June 13 article in The Los Angeles Times, the fiscal 2005 defense appropriations bill included more than $20 million in funding for at least 10 companies for whom KSA lobbied. Carmen Scialabba, a longtime Murtha aide, works at KSA as well. KSA directly lobbied Murtha's office on behalf of seven companies, and a Murtha aide told a defense contractor that it should retain KSA to represent it, according to the LA Times.

In early 2004, Murtha reportedly leaned on U.S. Navy officials to sign a contract to transfer the Hunters Point Shipyard to the city of San Francisco, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. A company called Lennar Inc. had right to the land, and Laurence Pelosi, nephew to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was an executive with the firm at that time.

Murtha also inserted earmarks in defense bills that steered millions of dollars in federal research funds toward companies owned by children of fellow Pennsylvania Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D).
Murtha also flexed his muscles with the DOD to get his boss, Pelosi a big DOD deal for her district:

The agreement came a few weeks after the Navy sent Newsom a letter saying that it was having doubts about going ahead with an agreement that was announced with great fanfare in Washington in January 2002 by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, then-Mayor Willie Brown and Navy Secretary Gordon England.

When he was in Washington last Wednesday, Newsom met in the Capitol offices of Pelosi, the House minority leader, with Pelosi, Navy Assistant Secretary Hansford T. Johnson, representatives of California Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a big gun brought in by Pelosi to convince the Navy the time for delays had passed.

Murtha, the powerful ranking Democrat on the House military appropriations subcommittee, made it clear to the Navy that he wanted a binding agreement signed by Wednesday. Another meeting was held in Pelosi's offices Wednesday, minus Newsom, and the Navy signed the accord.

According to THE HILL Murtha is the number one Democrat money grubber in the Congress from the defense industry:
For the past three years, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, has been the No. 1 beneficiary of defense campaign donations in the House and has not fallen below No. 3 for Congress as a whole.

In fact, for just the 2006 cycle, Murtha ranks No. 1 overall, with $188,350 in donations from the defense industry. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) follows with $118,350. In 2004, Murtha ranked behind only President Bush and his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, in overall defense-industry contributions, with $284,750.

During the 2002 election cycle, when Murtha was forced to campaign for his seat because of state redistricting that pitted him against a fellow congressman in the primary, he again scored No. 1 in all Congress, pulling in $309,299 in political donations from defense companies.

In 2000, Murtha slipped behind Hunter, who at that point was running for Armed Services chairman. “Murtha walks on water. If you want anything done on the committee, you go to Murtha. Murtha is the reason why the [defense appropriations] bill gets done each year,” said Ashdown about the veteran Congressman known to be a dealmaker who frequently reaches across the aisle.

But Murtha also has raised some watchdogs’ concerns because his brother Robert “Kit” Murtha runs KSA Consulting, a lobbying group that represents some 10 smaller defense companies. In 2004, Murtha’s brother was able to secure $20 million in the defense-spending bill for his clients. Kit Murtha repeatedly has denied working directly with his brother’s office.

Oh my, what a man.

[dryfly]

Invading Iraq for oil is as plausible as the idea of invading Wall Street to get shares of Google. In either case it shows a fundamental incomprehension of how the industry works.

Google isn't buried thousands of feet under Wall Street... but the oil is thousands of feet under the Middle East... Likewise chaos outside NASDAQ or NYSE won't stop Google from operating their search engines but chaos in the oil patch & terminals & out in the Persian Gulf could keep oil from flowing... or at least enough oil to meet demand. Somebody has to be in control of the ground above the oil to be sure it gets to the tankers & to us. That is a FUNDAMENTAL difference.

And since we love oil more than our own flesh and blood, we won't go.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08herbert.html?ex=1281153600&en=2b72c1d42e07ddea&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

August 8, 2005

The Pain Deep Inside
By BOB HERBERT

Washington

Specialist Craig Peter Olander Jr. has the look of a mischievous kid, except that his eyes sometimes telegraph that they've seen too much. And there's a weariness that tends to slip into his voice that seems unusual for someone just 21 years old. Killing can do that to a person.

Specialist Olander was a teenager from Waynesburg, Ohio, population 1,000, when he joined the Army in 2003. "It was very appealing," he said. "The benefits. College. And it was something I'd always wanted to do since I was a small boy - be in the Army."

He had mixed feelings about going to Iraq, but he wasn't particularly upset. He didn't dwell on the possibility of getting killed or wounded. And he gave no thought at all to the spiritual or psychological toll that combat can take. "I was very confident in my training and I was very religious," he said. "I'd always read Bible stories as a child and I believed the Lord would look over me and his will would be done."

He went to Iraq in early 2004 and quickly learned that nothing - not his military training, not the Bible, nothing - had adequately prepared him for the experience. By the time he returned several months later, he said, the trauma he had encountered in Iraq had reached deep inside him. There was both fear and the hint of a plea in his voice as he told me, with surprising candor, that he believed the things he'd had to do in Iraq might jeopardize the salvation of his soul.

"Our base was Camp Victory in Baghdad," he said. "We did raids, convoys, security, patrols - numerous, numerous things."

The first time he was wounded was in the spring....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/opinion/15herbert.html?ex=1281758400&en=4aa46475578896ac&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

August 15, 2005

Lives Blown Apart
By BOB HERBERT

Sema Olson was in the living room watching television when the phone rang. It was the Department of the Army calling. A voice asked if she'd heard from her son in the past 24 hours.

Ms. Olson tried to ward off the panic. "Is he still alive?" she asked.

After verifying her identity, the man on the phone assured her that her son, Bobby Rosendahl, who was stationed in Iraq, was still alive. But he'd been badly wounded.

With that Saturday night phone call, life as Ms. Olson had known it came to an end. Her family's long, long period of overwhelming sacrifice was under way.

Bobby Rosendahl, a 24-year-old Army corporal (and avid golfer) from Tacoma, Wash., was literally blown into the air last March 12 when an improvised explosive device detonated beneath his Stryker armored vehicle. He remembers landing on his back, with fuel spilling all around him and insurgents firing at him from the roof of a mosque.

Ms. Olson, during an interview in Washington, D.C., where Corporal Rosendahl is being treated at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, quietly cataloged her son's wounds: ...

[ilsm]

Jill,

Why bring up Murtha's record on defense waste and abuse. He is in a large fraternity in that regard.

He is true to this government's commitment, as the rest in the congress, to use defense spending to transfer wealth from working people to the for profit arsenal system.

He is no more cautious on weapons which are not needed and do not work well as his opposed colleague who support the waste of our soldiers lives along with the money.

He seems to have found a heart about the human toll, unlike the ruling party.

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/10/opinion/10herbert.html

November 10, 2005

An Army Ready to Snap
By BOB HERBERT

Have you heard what's been happening to the military?

Most people have heard that more than 2,000 American G.I.'s have been killed in the nonstop meat grinder of Iraq. There was a flurry of stories about that grim milestone in the last week of October. (Since then the official number of American deaths has jumped to at least 2,055, and it continues to climb steadily.)

More than 15,000 have been wounded in action.

But the problems of the military go far beyond the casualty figures coming out of the war zone. The Army, for example, has been stretched so taut since the Sept. 11 attacks, especially by the fiasco in Iraq, that it's become like a rubber band that may snap at any moment.

President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld convinced themselves that they could win the war in Iraq on the cheap. They never sent enough troops to do the job. Now the burden of trying to fight a long and bitter war with too few troops is taking a terrible toll on the men and women in uniform.

Last December, the top general in the Army Reserve warned that his organization was "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force" because of the Pentagon's "dysfunctional" policies and demands placed on the Reserve by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

As one of my colleagues at The Times, David Unger of the editorial board, wrote, "The Army's commitments have dangerously and rapidly expanded, while recruitment has plunged."

Soldiers are being sent into the crucible of Iraq for three and even four tours, a form of Russian roulette that is unconscionable.

"They feel like they're the only ones sacrificing," said Paul Rieckhoff, a former Army lieutenant who served in Iraq and is now the executive director of Operation Truth, an advocacy group for service members and veterans.

"They're starting to look around and say, 'You know, it's me and my buddies over and over again, and everybody else is living life uninterrupted.' "

When I asked Mr. Rieckhoff what he thought was happening with the Army, he replied, "The wheels are coming off." ...

[Bruce Webb]

"STill amazes me... not even Krugman so much as mentions oil, which is the reason we CANNOT leave. Our country is seriously addicted, and repubs and demos are in deep denial."

Have you checked out Iraqi oil production numbers recently? Oil may have been a reason for going in, but it certainly is not a reason for not pulling out. The Iraqi oil spigot is barely dripping today, and won't open as long as insurgents know the US will demand direct exploitation of it once it flows. Anyone who still imagines that invading Iraq is somehow helping keep the flow of oil going to US gas tanks needs to read a newspaper.

[anne]

http://krugman.page.nytimes.com/b/a/221727.htm

Nov. 23, 2005

Denial and Deception, Revisited

I'm trying not to write too much about the Iraq war these days. It's an issue I'm passionate about, and there was a long time when I felt I had to speak out, even though I have no special expertise in national security, because it seemed that so few people in major news organizations were willing to say the obvious. But now there are many voices talking about how we got into this disastrous war and how we might get out....

There is one question about Iraq, however, on which I think I can shed some light: Why now? Why has the question of whether we were misled into war sprung into the forefront of our political debate, more than two years after it became clear that there were no W.M.D.?

Part of the answer is that some new information has emerged about how the White House misrepresented the intelligence it had. But the truth is that by the summer of 2003 there was ample evidence that the administration had deliberately misled the public to promote a war it wanted.

So why didn't the public read and hear more about this evidence until very recently? The answer, I'm afraid, is that the polls led the discussion, rather than following it. With some honorable exceptions, politicians and the news media weren't willing to take the issue on until President Bush had already been politically wounded....

[anne]

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views03/0624-04.htm

June 24, 2003

Denial and Deception
By Paul Krugman - New York Times

Politics is full of ironies. On the White House Web site, George W. Bush's speech from Oct. 7, 2002 — in which he made the case for war with Iraq — bears the headline "Denial and Deception." Indeed.

There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious.

About the deception: Leaks from professional intelligence analysts, who are furious over the way their work was abused, have given us a far more complete picture of how America went to war. Thanks to reporting by my colleague Nicholas Kristof, other reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and a magisterial article by John Judis and Spencer Ackerman in The New Republic, we now know that top officials, including Mr. Bush, sought to convey an impression about the Iraqi threat that was not supported by actual intelligence reports.

In particular, there was never any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda; yet administration officials repeatedly suggested the existence of a link. Supposed evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program was thoroughly debunked by the administration's own experts; yet administration officials continued to cite that evidence and warn of Iraq's nuclear threat.

And yet the political and media establishment is in denial, finding excuses for the administration's efforts to mislead both Congress and the public.

For example, some commentators have suggested that Mr. Bush should be let off the hook as long as there is some interpretation of his prewar statements that is technically true. Really? We're not talking about a business dispute that hinges on the fine print of the contract; we're talking about the most solemn decision a nation can make. If Mr. Bush's speeches gave the nation a misleading impression about the case for war, close textual analysis showing that he didn't literally say what he seemed to be saying is no excuse. On the contrary, it suggests that he knew that his case couldn't stand close scrutiny....

[Bruce Webb]

"Oil is a mercantile thing as much as the anti Israel lobby wishes it were otherwise."

And it largely is not flowing from Iraq now. Opponents of "cut and run" need to explain why US occupation is a net benefit either in terms of daily security or oil production. Would the insurgents be more or less like to strike pipelines if we were not there?

People who supported US involvement going in, and stressed how easy this would be, and how oil production would pay for the whole thing, are by and large the same people that say leaving would create increased unrest and restrictions on the pumping of oil. Umm. You folk were totally wrong in your analysis (and analysis is being charitable) going in, why on earth would be possibly accept your bare assertions now? In this like in so many other topics aired in the blogosphere assertions trump numbers and argument. Some people need to bring some rigor to the table.