Jun
14
Winston Churchill’s comments on Iraq still relevant today
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The US-supported Maliki government has rejected the US proposals for a long-term presence in Iraq, saying that it would infringe on Iraqi sovereignty. In particular, Maliki doesn’t want the US to be able to use Iraqi air space or territory at will (like, for an attack on Iran) and he objects to the immunity from Iraqi law that the US wants for our troops and contractors. Of course, Maliki has no choice: — the anti-American Shiite militia controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr is threatening to revolt if the deal is accepted, the religious community is opposed to it, and poll after poll shows that the Iraqi public thinks we have overstayed our welcome.
In our book we predicted this would happen: just by following the money trail it is obvious that the expensive bases the US has constructed in Iraq were built with a view to long-term US occupancy.
Thus the US faces a situation not dissimilar to that of Britain after World War I, when the British were trying to maintain military control of Iraq in the face of Sunni and Shiite opposition.
This calls to mind Winston Churchill’s statement to David Lloyd George on September 1, 1922:
“I am deeply concerned about Iraq …. I think we should now put definitely, not only to Feisal but to the Constituent Assembly, the position that unless they beg us to stay and to stay on our own terms in regard to efficient control, we shall actually evacuate before the close of the financial year. I would put this issue in the most brutal way, and if they are not prepared to urge us to stay and to co-operate in every manner I would actually clear out…..
At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.”
(Many thanks to Ret. US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor of the Center for Defense Information for finding this quote.)
Jun
13
The number of US troops wounded in Iraq continues to escalate rapidly — and as it does, the cost of the war goes up too.
Here’s an example: on June 8th, a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a small US patrol base in the northern province of Tamim — killing one soldier, and wounding 18 others soldiers. This pattern has occurred throughout the war.
The consequences are far-reaching. Not only are 18 troops wounded, but dozens of others who witnessed the bloody attack and narrowly escaped injury will suffer from shock, trauma, guilt, stress, anxiety , insomnia, and other problems. Remember — these troops were not even out on patrol, they were inside their own supposedly safe barracks in a residential neighborhood. According to recent studies, about one-third of these soldiers will end up suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Some will also be diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury from the force of the blast.
So a suicide bombing that killed one soldier will cause dozens if not hundreds of veterans to seek costly medical treatment and to claim disability compensation. This helps explain the numbers to date: 4094 deaths, 60,000 wounded or injured; 330,000 seeking medical treatment from the Veterans Department.
The cost of providing this medical care (at military hospitals, veterans hospitals, clinics, and outpatient facilities) and the cost of paying disability stipends to these veterans and their dependents will be a strain on the US budget for decades to come.
May
30
Research on Cost of War cited in British Newspaper
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Recently, Linda Bilmes spoke at the prestigious Hay-On-Wye Festival in Wales, UK. The following is an excerpt from this article, written shortly after Bilmes’ keynote address.
The Guardian (UK)
May 25
It’s shaming to have to come to an American to get the most probing analysis of the cost of Britain’s involvement in Iraq. …
Here at Hay we had Linda Bilmes, a former senior official in the US Department of Commerce, telling us that it was “striking” how the British government had concealed the war’s cost, and was still hiding it.
Of course, the Bush administration has done the same. Bilmes and co-author, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist, were discussing their book, the Three Trillion Dollar War. Some of their key data had come from searches done under the Freedom of Information Act, Bilmes said. She urged British journalists to use the same approach in the UK. The British government had admitted to a cost so far of £22,000 millions, but the true cost was much higher. The difficulty was that no figures were given on how much of the Treasury’s special reserve funds go to the war.
May
20
Democrats Support New GI Bill, Bush and McCain Oppose it
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By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz
One of the sharpest distinctions between the Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls is their stand on increasing educational benefits for veterans. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton support new legislation that would boost college benefits to levels comparable with the original GI Bill of Rights, enacted more than 60 years ago. They argue that our troops deserve this investment and that the cost – at $3-4 billion annually – is less than the US spends on combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in a single week.
The original GI Bill enabled 8 million returning World War II veterans to afford an education. The law was simple and democratic: all troops who had served for at least 90 days and received an honorable discharge were eligible. The benefits paid for tuition, lab fees, books, vocational training, housing and a living stipend. Dependents of servicemen killed in action could also qualify. Historians have written about how the bill “reinvented” America after the war – making it possible to cope with the flood of demobilized young men who would otherwise have been desperately looking for work. The bill had far-reaching implications for the country: the number of people earning college degrees tripled; private elitist colleges and universities were forced to open their doors to minorities, Catholics and Jews, and American higher education became a gateway to the professions for the whole population instead of just a finishing school for the upper classes. In the 11 years following the passage of the bill, the GI bill had produced 450,000 engineers, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 25,000 dentists and a multitude of other professionals.
The GI bill also provided a big shot in the arm for the US economy. A study by the congressional Joint Economic Committee in 1988 calculated that the US economy grew by $7 for every $1 invested in veterans’ education. This “multiplier” boosted the economy nationwide: educational institutions all over the country expanded, built new dormitories, classrooms and housing for students. Newly educated GIs bought homes (using GI bill housing loans) which laid the groundwork for turning the US into a home owning society.
Veterans who served in Korea and Vietnam were also entitled to decent educational benefits. But the troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today get a very raw deal. The soaring cost of education combined with a watering down of the benefits means that current veterans cannot even cover tuition fees at state colleges, let alone books and general living costs. The maximum education benefit today is supposed to cover 70% of tuition at a state institution. In practice the system has so many obstacles that most veterans cannot even obtain this. Each serviceman or woman has to pay a $1200- $1800 nonrefundable contribution when they join the military. But 30% never use any of the benefits – so the government pockets $230 million from enlistees without providing anything in return. Second, National Guards and Reservists – despite having contributed one-quarter of the fighting force in Iraq and Afghanistan – are not eligible for many of the benefits. Third, the application process is protracted and bureaucratic: more than 118,000 veterans are waiting for their education claims to be processed by VA.
The bill before Congress would cover full tuition and fees at state universities for those who have served at least 3 years, together with a modest cost-of-living allowance – essentially tripling the level of benefits. The bill would also insert some common-sense changes into the system, including allowing veterans to pay the opt-in fee over 2 years instead of one, and expanding eligibility for Guards and Reservists.
The proposal has attracted widespread bipartisan support. But Senator McCain has joined with the White House and the Pentagon to oppose the bill. Their main objection is that the measure is expensive, and would hurt our ability to retain experienced troops.
This argument – like many of our policies on Iraq — is completely myopic. We know that the number one reason young people sign up for the military is the educational benefits. The military is spending $20 billion this year on recruiting, yet even so it is obliged to accept 12% of new recruits with criminal records and 20% who lack a high school diploma in order to meet its recruiting goals. Boosting educational benefits would do more than any other single measure to increase the quantity and quality of military recruits – which is a prerequisite to retaining them in the long run.
Second, the revised GI Bill would help combat the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression among Iraq veterans. Already some 120,000 Iraq and Afghan veterans have been treated for mental illness including 68,000 suffering from PTSD. One of the best treatments is to offer a way of integrating troops back into society and education benefits are an effective way to achieve this. The $4 billion price tag is low in comparison to the cost of medical care and disability compensation that would otherwise be paid out each year to these veterans.
Third, a new GI bill is exactly the type of measure we need to combat a deepening economic recession. Unlike money spent in Iraq, money spent on veterans’ education benefits goes straight back into the US economy here at home. During the past 20 years, the gap between the earnings of the college educated and those without a high school education has widened substantially. This means that the economic return from providing education benefits will be even bigger than it was sixty years ago.
The money we spend on a new GI bill should be considered a cost of war. But unlike most of what we are spending, this amount will be repaid many times over.
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Linda Bilmes (whose father attended college on the GI Bill) and Joseph Stiglitz (winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics) are co-authors of “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict”.
May
19
Dollar-Driven Recruitment
By Allen McDuffee
April 10 was a telling day for military recruitment in Washington, even if the words “military recruitment” were barely uttered.
The end of two days of intense Congressional testimony from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a speech from George Bush and testimony from Defense Secretary Robert Gates in front of the Senate Committee on Armed Services triangulated the point we subconsciously knew all along. The troops aren’t coming home.
They informed us that troop levels in Iraq won’t drop to 100,000 by the end of the year, that Petraeus will have “all the time he needs” to contemplate additional withdrawals and that there would be a reduction in tour time from fifteen to twelve months for those deployed in the future–not an offer for the troops currently engaged, many of whom are in Iraq or Afghanistan for their second, third or fourth tour.
Calculating this imbalanced equation of maintaining troop levels while reducing tour duration should have led to the question, Where will the troops come from? Instead, this three-front assault kept media and Congress primarily focused on the ethics of withdrawing from Iraq–an argument the Bush Administration is much more comfortable having than one on the human costs of invasion and occupation.
In the midst of that April 10 speech, Bush boasted that “recruiting and retention have remained strong during the surge.” Of course he neglected to mention how the Army, because of low numbers of new recruits, was forced to refashion its enlistment criteria over the course of the last few years, allowing them to say at this moment that they were meeting their 2008 recruiting goals of 80,000 in the active Army and 26,500 for the Army Reserve.
Read more here.