Iraq, Afghanistan, War and Money: A Look at Two Presidencies

0:00I have the paper here, I have a bunch of copies, it's an Independence Institute working paper, and I think that the real critique of the wars certainly goes beyond all this and I touch on that very briefly at the end, but this is kind of a wonkish treatment on the question because I wanted to look at some of the specifics because we know that Bush and Obama, we know, Everyone here knows and most people in the country know that Obama hasn't exactly ended the wars, but insofar as it matters for people who, insofar as it matters, the details, I'm sure people will say, yeah, but Obama is ending the wars or whatever.

0:51And the thing is, the claim as such is not obviously 100% false in every respect, perhaps. And I think we need to be careful when we get into the details, and so there are some details here. So during the run-up to the ascension of Obama to the throne, when he was running for office, he was critical of the Iraq War. He said things like, this war has lasted longer than World War I, II, the Civil War, 4,000 Americans have died, and of course those are the only people that matter in the war, more than 60,000 have been injured, we've spent trillions of dollars, we're less safe. These were very correct critiques of the Iraq War. A lot of us stooped to the level of making these kinds of utilitarian critiques.

1:41They're almost utilitarian anyway. I don't think they're the most important reason to oppose the Iraq war, but they're important reasons. They're sufficient reasons on their own, certainly. And he did sound better on the Iraq war than Bush or McCain. At the same time, he always, and this is something forgotten, he always was worse on Afghanistan. And the Democrats, from Kerry to Obama, and most mainstream Democrats, were always worse on Afghanistan. He, you know, his position paper said, you know, he's been calling for more troops and research or resources for the war in Afghanistan for years. He and Obama will divert resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. And so, to his everlasting shame, he has not broken this promise. Now, another point I want to make is on Iraq, he wasn't as anti-war. He was always slippery on this war.

2:36And I'm sure most people here kind of know this, but I want to just relate a couple of these interesting points. In 04, you know, the position of the Democrats was always, we shouldn't have, well not always, but at the best, minus like Kucinich, the position was we shouldn't have gone in. Now we're in, we're going to have to get out one day, but it sure is irresponsible to talk about getting out now. We need, you know, because we need to be responsible. We need to fix the country and then we'll get out. And so in 2004, in the Chicago Tribune, he says, there's not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush's position at this stage. Throughout the years, he voted for war funding once he was senator, and he defended his votes for war funding because it would be wrong to defund an immoral war. That's not what he said. Sorry, I'm a little flippant about these. And in 2008, this was one of the most disgusting things after the

3:29The Democrats somewhat heroically were calling Petraeus General Petraeus and opposing the surge of 07. He said to Bill O'Reilly, this surge succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. This is important to note too. It's very important. In December of 08, when he was the lame duck president, this is often forgotten, Bush signed the status of forces agreement with Iraqi Leadership and so forth. And what it did was it set the timetable for withdrawal. And the timetable for withdrawal that Bush signed was almost precisely – it was very close to the timetable for withdrawal that Obama had proposed within a couple of months.

4:15And so the official US policy by the time Obama took office was that – the official Bill Bush policy was that the US would withdraw the troops from the cities by June of 2009 and by the end of this year, 2011, the troops would leave Iraq entirely. That was the policy when Obama took power. He did not expedite that. To his credit, he hasn't put all his Now, it is true that the troop levels in Iraq, I don't pronounce it the way they do on NPR, I don't know, I pronounce it like an American, but unlike the people at NPR, I'm opposed to killing them no matter what. So, in Iraq, at the height of the surge, which worked beyond Under Wildest Dreams, there were 170,000 troops, US troops in Iraq, and now there's under 50,000, which by the way, the number of troops in Iraq now is about the number that Rumsfeld and those clowns said that we would need for the war. So now that the war

5:34is kind of wrapping up, we're at the level that they thought we'd need to invade and and Conquer and Occupy and Win. Afghanistan, meanwhile, Obama has fulfilled his promises, the monster, before 2006, except for a blip in July, there were about 10,000 to 20,000 troops, it varied, and then by the time Bush left office, unfortunately, he ramped up Afghanistan a bit too, to 33,000 troops. By mid-last year, there were almost three times as many, 91,000 troops. and Human Action. So in 2009 Obama kept, you know, he's almost tripled down in Afghanistan. This is of course, this is just gives you an idea. Now the total number of troops which is that top line, it has declined in the last several months and we don't know yet whether he's going to fulfill the Iraq promise.

6:27And right now his administration, Gates, who by the way was Bush's defense secretary too 2, of course. Gates has floated the idea we might have to stay beyond 2011. And some Democrats in the Armed Services Committee are saying, yeah, we can't just withdraw all willy-nilly. I mean, you can't just go into a country and bomb it and stay there for only eight years. be Reckless. So the troop level has declined a bit, but if you look at it, the total number of troops under Obama for most of it has been higher than it was under Bush, except at the end of Bush. And the first half of the Bush administration, which is when there were people in the streets, Bush is a war criminal, when the left was correct about something, there were fewer troops. There were more US fatalities in Iraq, but if you look at fatalities even, the total number of US fatalities in 2009 and 2010 was higher than it was in 2003, and

7:42it was still pretty high, and higher than it was in 2008, the last Bush year. In fact, since Bush was planning, let's say we had a third Bush term, which is actually the position I advocated to keep Bush in office. No one liked him, and how much worse could it get? If he was planning to withdraw gradually from Iraq and leave Afghanistan alone, there's a lot of other considerations, of course. I think the trajectory would have been much better than we are today, where Iraq is about where I think it would have been, and Afghanistan's much worse. Private contractors, another thing the left used to talk about, and some of them There's three good leftists in America who talk about this, but it used to be a common talking point. After he took office, he boosted private contractors by about a quarter in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

8:35As of January 2011, of course, this is government data, and you'd be surprised how much they don't know what they're talking about. Every month it goes up and down, but there's 87,000 contractors in Afghanistan, 71,000 in Iraq. And what's interesting is in the first half of 2010, now these aren't all Americans, so people, you know, Americans don't really care, but there was a time, it does, it gives some idea of what's going on with the occupation and everything. There were more civilian contractors that died in the first half of 2010 than there were soldiers. And some people are pointing out that by shifting some of the burden to contractors, it obscures what's going on. And this only, mostly this counts Defense Department contractors. There's also State Department contractors. There's supposed to be 17,000 of these people within, you know, by the end of the year or in a couple of years or something.

9:31Now war funding, Obama always said that we're spending way too much, we're going to go line by line in the budget. And one of the only things he said that sounded like if he went, came through with it, it'd be good, is that we could save money on Iraq. That's And that's how we're going to feed everyone from cradle to grave. We'll just stop the Iraq war. And it doesn't really add up that way, but at least cutting the spending. And he did cut the spending in Iraq, but the spending has gone up so much in Afghanistan that other than the last two, this is adjusted to inflation to make Bush look worse because I want to give Bush, I'm trying to give Obama the benefit of the doubt because I'm arguing against Obama. But I don't believe in the consumer price index, but whatever.

10:18Other than Bush's last two years with the Surgeon All, total spending was lower for most of the Bush term than here on the two wars. And as you can see, these are all in billions, it's not even real money anymore. It's all Fed money. But the bottom line is that I don't see much spending there, nothing that can pay for national I want to just mention a couple of the more important things. This is important when you're trying to show someone what's really going on, if people are curious about troop levels, and there's a significance. I certainly don't think that American soldiers having to be there, I don't want to come off like that's not a big issue, and I don't want to come off like the money's not a big issue.

11:11And that's why I just made a big issue of both of them. But at the same time, there's other more fundamental things going on right now that we should all keep in mind. On the war funding, not just the fact that it's out of control, Obama criticized Bush for doing it kind of on the side by not putting it in the budget. Well, his first year Obama had a big supplemental war funding bill, another broken promise. The withdrawal plan in Iraq, as I said, is basically on course of what it was anyway. Yes, we can do what Bush was going to do anyway. We have the same defense secretary, which I think says something, doesn't it? I mean, call me crazy, but change that we can believe in when your biggest change that people care about, or one of the biggest changes is the war, to have the same guy, you know, I don't know. Just call me old fashioned. I think you fire the guy in charge if the whole

12:09operation is a stinky mess. The Afghan war has expanded out of control and the war makes no sense. The government says there's a hundred al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. And so we've got, you know, the troop levels are higher, more people are dying. They want to stamp out the opium trade. They can't even stop people from buying crack four blocks from the White House. Not that they should try, but they can't do it. I mean, this is the most ridiculous war. It's even a more ridiculous war than the Iraq war in terms of the idea behind it, I think. Meanwhile, Pakistan, he's drone-attacking Pakistan. He's expanded this war greatly. One or two million Pakistani refugees have had to leave the Swat Valley. It's one of The greatest refugee crisis since Rwanda. He's bombed Yemen, Obama has bombed Somalia, even threatened Eritrea, this tiny little country near Ethiopia with invasion.

13:08In a normal country, when your government says it might invade a country, people have the clue. But it's war so much with so many countries, no one even knows any of this stuff. And on Iran, although people think he's like this Muslim selling out or whatever, he sounds a little less belligerent, but he continues to lie about stuff, like when they caught Iran red-handed with that calm nuclear facility, and by catching them red-handed, Iran reported that they had this facility, which they didn't really start working on yet, according to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the national intelligence estimate, the administration, pin down on the question and the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, they all say Iran's basically following the law. So he's basically lying about that. We've got on civil liberties and human rights, it's basically, some things are slightly better, some things are worse and most things are the same. Warrantless surveillance has continued and it's been normalized because now it's just, of course they can do that. The TSA

14:17Outrages have gotten worse and it's really sad that now the left thinks that you're crazy if you oppose the police state and the right, which I'm glad the right is finally realizing the federal government shouldn't get to touch us like this. Detention without charge, which is a big deal, I mean only very, very briefly, it's continued. The habeas corpus is basically just as gutted. On Guantanamo he was supposed to close it within a year, now it looks like they're never The administration's position was, we'll try him and we'll convict him. And if we don't convict him, we'll still detain him.

15:03So, of course, the American right-wing goes crazy because, you know, how dare he be soft on terrorism. Renditioning, you know, this outsourcing of people to be tortured. I don't know if it's quite as severe, but one example, I'll just very briefly, in 2009, they renditioned a guy. He wasn't even accused of terrorism. He was accused of knowing about supposed fraud related to defense contracting that involves something like $100,000. So they tied him to a chair, they deprived him of sleep. They tell him his family's in danger or he'll never see him again. You know, all the horrible stuff that happened under Bush. But he was basically like a Martha Stewart level.

15:48I mean, Martha Stewart did nothing wrong. This guy, you know, worked with the government. But this guy was, I mean, knowing about defense fraud of 100,000 being tortured, the defense, I don't know, just, it's disgusting and, you know, there's less concern about it. The drone attacks are through the roof. There's robot killing. You know, Bradley Manning, the likely whistleblower with WikiLeaks, he's being detained and Obama used to say, we're going to protect whistleblowers and I guess they mean protect them with steel cages or whatever, but basically we have the same basic trajectory on war, on spending, on Civil Liberties, on Foreign Policy, the Defense Department is as bloated as ever, and I think that we got to just never forget this because people forget that both parties are the same on pretty much everything and foreign policy may be more than anything else.

16:53So thank you. Thank you very much.