Month: January 2005

Imagine if Bush was blessed with a modicum of foresight, and had told the truth about a war against Iraq back in 2002. In The Speech Bush Should have Given, Juan Cole describes what such a speech might have said – about the costs in dollars and lives, about the geopolitical issues, about the reasons. Money (ouch!) quote: “A war against Iraq will be expensive. It will cost you, the taxpayer, about $300 billion over five years. I know Wolfowitz is telling you Iraq’s oil revenues will pay for it all, but that’s ridiculous. Iraq only pumps about $10 billion a year worth of oil, and it’s going to need that just to run the new government we’re putting in. No, we’re going to have to pay for it, ourselves. I’m going to ask you for $25 billion, then $80 billion, then another $80 billion. And so on. I’m going to be back to you for money more often than that unemployed relative that you don’t like. The cost of the war is going to drive up my already massive budget deficits from about $370 billion to more like $450 billion a year. Just so you understand, I’m going to cut taxes on rich people at the same time that I fight this war. Then I’m going to borrow the money to fight it, and to pay for much of what the government does. And you and your children will be paying off that debt for decades.”

James Wolcott describes: “watching Senator Joe Lieberman […] drone his support for the nomination of Condi Rice as Secretary of Clueless, arguing that we should celebrate the breakthrough confirmation of an African-American woman for such a powerful post, even though her being African-American and a woman were irrelevant to her qualifications. Then why bring it up? I suppose it’s progress of a sort when a duplicitous incompetent can be promoted regardless of race or gender […] but it ought to make for a muted celebration.” Indeed.

(Via Jon, who manages to be amused by it – no small achievement.)

Marty Lederman has once again taken aim at Heather MacDonald, self-appointed apologist for administation policy about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In a recent item in Balkinization, he writes “Let’s be very clear about this: The DoD General Counsel (who’s recently been renominated for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit) concluded that threats of killing a detainee’s family members, and waterboarding, and forced nudity, and the use of dogs to induce stress, etc., not only did not violate the UCMJ, but are ‘humane’! There is no indication in the public record that Secretary Rumsfeld or any other high-level DoD official ever contradicted or overruled these legal conclusions — and every indication that Rumsfeld agreed with them.”

And while it’s a point that has been made before, let me repeat: would Ms. MacDonald regard such policies as “humane” and “legal” if they were applied to captured US troops by another power – North Vietnam, say, or perhaps Iran? (Arguing for a difference between regular troops and “terrorists” won’t wash – most of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib had not been legally classified, and the presumption should have been that they were therefore covered by Geneva.) Such an acknowledgement is unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon….

(Via Sully.)