Looking back at Blackwater

http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/07/01/3978963/us-officials-supported-blackwater.html

Uh-hum. 

Professional Militaries and Mercenaries

 William Astor of TomsDispatch asks: Are we not unlike 18th Century European Monarchs?  

"Our wars and their impact are kept in remarkable isolation from what passes for public affairs in this country, leaving most Americans with little knowledge and even less say about whether they should be, and how they are, waged. In this sense, our wars are eerily like those pursued by European monarchs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: conflicts carried out by professional militaries and bands of mercenaries, largely at the whim of what we might now call a unitary executive, funded by deficit spending, for the purposes of protecting or extending the interests of a ruling elite."

And who's right on top of the new mercenary money binge?  Erik Prince, formerly known as founder of Blackwater, (a company that changed its name to a symbol that only the artist formerly-and-now-once-again-known as Prince can pronounce), has pounced on the opportunities in the Middle East "uprisings" and stands prepared to act in whatever manner the top dollar brings:

Two UAE government officials contacted by Reuters declined immediate comment on the New York Times report, and the U.S. embassy in the UAE also had no immediate comment. It was not possible to locate Prince for comment.
The Times quoted a U.S. official who was aware of the program as saying: "The Gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don't have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help."
State Department spokesman Mark Toner told The Times the department was investigating to see if the project broke any U.S. laws. U.S. law requires a license for American citizens to train foreign troops.
Toner also pointed out that Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, had paid $42 million in fines in 2010 for training foreign forces in Jordan without a license, the Times said.
According to former employees of the project and U.S. officials cited by the Times, the troops were brought to a training camp in the UAE from Colombia, South Africa and other countries, starting in the summer of 2010.
They were being trained by retired U.S. military, and former members of German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, the Times said.
Prince had insisted the force hire no Muslims, because they "could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims," the paper said.

Reading these two articles together makes me think that the first article didn't go back far enough.  This is much more like the Crusades in the Middle Ages.  Plus, as a Doobie Brothers fan, I'm super mad at Mr. Prince for giving the term "Blackwater" a nefarious connotation. 

Military Spending Out of Control

Interesting article on AlterNet from Chalmers Johnson about how much we (mis)spend national defense:

"It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

Before we try to break down and analyze this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: "A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it.""

Only so many places we can cut, and we need to make cuts. Our military spending is hurting us in the pocketbook (not to mention the immorality of the Iraq invasion/occupation, or the fact that it has actually worked against our national interest, making us less safe). Time to regroup.

War Costs Mounting

I remember when they estimated the war would pay for itself, cost $50 Billion at most, and now that's less than a "supplemental". From the AP:

"The $1.6 trillion figure, for the period from 2002 to 2008, translates into a cost of $20,900 for a family of four, the report said. The Bush administration has requested $804 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, the report stated.

For the Iraq war only, total economic costs were estimated at $1.3 trillion for the period from 2002 to 2008. That would cost a family of four $16,500, the report said....

...Meanwhile, “the sum of interest paid on Iraq-related debt from 2003 to 2017 will total over $550 billion,” the report said. The government has to make interest payments on the money it borrows to finance the national debt, which recently hit $9 trillion for the first time.

The report comes as the House prepares to vote this week on another effort by Democrats to set a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq as a condition for providing another $50 billion for the war."

I'm not really anti-war per se, but a cost-benefit analysis of the war does not look good, even if you're in the pro-torture camp. It would be difficult to prove that this war has been "worth it". Just imagine what we could have spent that money on...or saved in taxes if that's what you prefer.

One Certainty About Iraq

The One Certainty About Iraq: Spiraling Costs for Americans: "There are many uncertainties about the progress made by coalition forces and the future prospects for stability and democracy in Iraq, but there is at least one indisputable fact: The Bush administration vastly underestimated the costs of the Iraq war.

Not only in human lives, but in monetary terms as well, the costs of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq far exceed the administration's initial projection of a $50 billion tab. While the number of American casualties in Iraq has declined this year, the amount of money spent to fight the war and rebuild the country has spiralled upward."

Initial projection: $50 Billion
Latest projection: $1 Trillion
That's 20X more than projected.
And look what we have to show for it!

The Costs of War (continued)

The Costs of War:

"Check out these vivid examples: for the same $315 billion, over 71 million people could have received comprehensive health care (36 million are currently uninsured); 61 million students could receive university scholarships; nearly 5 million workers could be employed as port container inspectors (only 6 percent of the 9 million containers arriving annually are currently inspected); or every child in the world could be given basic immunizations for the next 80 years..."

Mushroom, Watch our Defense Budget

By KORI SCHAKE "In the wake of 9/11, it made sense to let defense spending mushroom to deal with new threats without cutting existing programs. But having worked on defense strategy and resources in the Pentagon and the National Security Council over the last decade, I'm now convinced that was a mistake.

Increasing the Department of Defense's budget 35 percent since 2001 prevented it from making hard trade-offs between what it prefers to do (continue existing weapons systems) and what the nation most needs (an agile force that can quickly defend us against terrorists).

The Pentagon's budget is larger than the next 18 defense budgets in the world. Of course, it's not surprising that the United States has the highest defense spending by a substantial margin, but the magnitude relative to potential enemies suggests we are not achieving our objectives in a cost-effective way.

The exchange ratio between what it costs, say, Al Qaeda to mount a terrorist attack and what we are spending to prevent or respond to them is not a hopeful prospect for our country in a long war. The central challenge for hegemonic powers is to avoid being stretched too thin by either taking on too many obligations or supporting them in an unsustainable way. In the 1950's, President Dwight D. Eisenhower justified his arbitrary cap on defense spending by saying that military force could freeze the confrontation while our real strengths of ideology and economy won the cold war."

War's $tunning Price Tag

Could we have fought the war in ways that would have protected our troops better and cost the country less? A Pentagon study apparently concludes that better body armor would have prevented many deaths and injuries. Penny-pinching in such matters during the rush to war has led to steep long-run costs for the nation and, tragically, for the individuals involved.

Even more fundamentally, there is the question of whether we needed to spend the money at all. Thinking back to the months before the war, there were few reasons to invade quickly, and many to go slow. The Bush policy of threatened force had pressured Iraq into allowing the U.N. inspectors back into the country. The inspectors said they required a few months to complete their work. Several of our closest allies, including France and Germany, were urging the U.S. to await the outcome of the inspections. There were, as we now know, conflicting intelligence reports.

Had we waited, the value of the information we would have learned from the inspectors would arguably have saved the nation at least $1 trillion — enough money to fix Social Security for the next 75 years twice over.

I know it's too late now, but I can't help looking back at what went wrong. I remember saying it would cost $400 Billion, and people thought that was crazy talk. Well, we've passed that 400B some time ago, now we're on to our great-grandkids with the debt load. (And the baby boomers sold themselves as "peaceniks", yeah right, "plunderers" turns out to be more like it....)

War $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Casualty of War: US Economy:

"The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost taxpayers $314 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office projects additional expenses of perhaps $450 billion over the next 10 years.

That could make the combined campaigns, especially the war in Iraq, the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years, causing even some conservative experts to criticize the open-ended commitment to an elusive goal. The concern is that the soaring costs, given little weight before now, could play a growing role in U.S. strategic decisions because of the fiscal impact."

Pretty soon you're talking about real money here...

Homeland Security vs. NRA

The New York Times > National > Terror Suspects Buying Firearms, Report Finds:

"Dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year, according to a Congressional investigation that points up major vulnerabilities in federal gun laws.

People suspected of being members of a terrorist group are not automatically barred from legally buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, indicated that people with clear links to terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this gap."

Um, can we fill this gap, please? To think of the billions we've spent and we allow this....