say hello to the elephant in the room:
Home | Costs of War
this is a new study from the eisenhower research project at brown raises some of the main issues that seem to have been more or less swept under the rug by the kind of structured collective amnesia that we live under, an attempt to maintain system legitimacy in the face of a legacy of absolute incompetence.
on the wars themselves, it's a sad state of affairs:
no-one in power has an interest in anything like an accurate accounting of the various levels of costs that follow from the various military debacles that the united states was launched into by the right.
no-one in power has an interest in the questions of why these wars were undertaken in the first place.
no-one in power has an interest in posing questions about the costs in terms of civil liberties of these debacles.
no-one in power has an interest in holding those who initiated these debacles accountable for their actions.
no-one seems to have an interest in holding the right in general accountable.
no-one seems to have an interest in holding the democratic party accountable for caving in to the right.
no-one seems to have an interest in holding congress accountable for capitulating to the bush administration, for abrogating their oversight function.
no-one seems to have an interest in facing reality at all.
at the same time, there is a largely meaningless debate about the national debt being orchestrated in congress that's meaningless because all of these military debacles are off the table. it's likely that is the case because the interests which profit from these debacles form the core patronage system favored by the right. but it is a breakdown of considerable proportions that there **no-one** is introducing this information.
the idea behind this report was to make public basic hard data to do with these issues with the idea of perhaps changing the debate.
what do you make of the report?
does the data surprise you? why is that?
do you think this will change the debate over what "fiscal responsibility" could possibly mean?
if not, what will keep it off the table?
what possible meaning could the debate have without these actions being figured into them?
for the record, i see this as a problem of plutocracy more than as a partisan matter.
i hold the right entirely responsible for afghanistan and iraq. there is no way around it. they are cluster-fucks of epic proportion and there's no obvious way out.
i also hold the obama administration responsible for being weak in their pursuit of ways out and---especially---for obstructing any moves to hold the bush administration legally accountable for their actions.
it's possible to do just anything, including what is arguably the worst war crime (if one takes the nuremberg standards seriously) of launching unprovoked wars of aggression if in so doing you place the legitimacy of the american plutocracy itself at stake. it's a kind of impunity that follows from it.
which is beyond sad.