September 10, 2004
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September 10, 2004
The Long Shadow of War
ach time President Bush has run for public office, he has had to weather critics' charges that he received silver-spoon treatment during the Vietnam War as a politician's son who gained coveted admission to the Texas Air National Guard while other young Americans were drafted into combat. The charges are back once more, this time with some telling new details in the form of private memos attributed to Mr. Bush's squadron commander of three decades ago.
The memos describe pressure from above to "sugarcoat" the Bush record after the commander had ordered the young pilot grounded for failure to comply with Guard obligations. And the memos also claimed that Mr. Bush "made no attempt" to meet larger performance obligations before heading off to a new unit based in Alabama, where he helped run a political campaign.
The memos, whose authenticity is being challenged, were disclosed on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" along with an interview with Ben Barnes, a Democrat and former lieutenant governor of Texas who repeated claims of having helped Mr. Bush and other favored individuals jump ahead of hundreds on the Guard waiting list in response to pressure from influential Texans.
The reporting touched off a series of salvos between Republicans, who repeatedly pointed out that Mr. Bush had eventually received an honorable discharge, and Democrats, who are still angry about the ads attacking
John Kerry's wartime service record on Swift boats.
The one thing becoming clear in this furious dispute is how much has changed since Vietnam. Everyone knows that military Reserve and Guard units did indeed provide sanctuary from the draft back then for many fortunate Americans, however they managed entry. But today, under the military's increasingly hard-pressed readiness, these units have become mainline combat conduits to the Iraq war. Far from escaping the front lines, men and women from supposedly part-time, home-front outfits are figuring all too sadly in the Iraq toll of 1,000 American deaths and counting.
This year's voters might keep this lethal turnabout in mind as rival campaigns would have them wallow entirely in the past. And as President Bush faces another bout of retrospective Vietnam politicking, we hope he keeps relevant lessons from his own military service at hand while fulfilling his obligations as commander in chief of today's embattled soldiers.
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September 10, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
How Many Deaths Will It Take?
By BOB HERBERT
t was Vietnam all over again - the heartbreaking head shots captioned with good old American names:
Jose Casanova, Donald J. Cline Jr., Sheldon R. Hawk Eagle, Alyssa R. Peterson.
Eventually there'll be a fine memorial to honor the young Americans whose lives were sacrificed for no good reason in Iraq. Yesterday, under the headline "The Roster of the Dead," The New York Times ran photos of the first thousand or so who were killed.
They were sent off by a president who ran and hid when he was a young man and his country was at war. They fought bravely and died honorably. But as in Vietnam, no amount of valor or heroism can conceal the fact that they were sent off under false pretenses to fight a war that is unwinnable.
How many thousands more will have to die before we acknowledge that
President Bush's obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for the United States?
Joshua T. Byers, Matthew G. Milczark, Harvey E. Parkerson 3rd, Ivory L. Phipps.
Fewer and fewer Americans believe the war in Iraq is worth the human treasure we are losing and the staggering amounts of money it is costing. But no one can find a way out of this tragic mess, which is why that dreaded word from the Vietnam era - quagmire - has been resurrected. Most Washington insiders agree with Senator John McCain, who said he believes the U.S. will be involved militarily in Iraq for 10 or 20 more years.
To what end? You can wave goodbye to the naïve idea that democracy would take root in Iraq and then spread like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East. That was never going to happen. So what are we there for, other than to establish a permanent military stronghold in the region and control the flow of Iraqi oil?
The insurgency in Iraq will never end as long as the U.S. is occupying the country. And our Iraqi "allies" will never fight their Iraqi brethren with the kind of intensity the U.S. would like, any more than the South Vietnamese would fight their fellow Vietnamese with the fury and effectiveness demanded by the hawks in the Johnson administration.
The Iraqi insurgents - whether one agrees with them or not - believe they are fighting for their homeland, their religion and their families. The Americans are not at all clear what they're fighting for. Saddam is gone. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The link between Saddam and the atrocities of Sept. 11 was always specious and has been proven so.
At some point, as in Vietnam, the American public will balk at the continued carnage, and this tragic misadventure will become politically unsustainable. Meanwhile, the death toll mounts.
Elia P. Fontecchio, Raheen Tyson Heighter, Sharon T. Swartworth, Ruben Valdez Jr.
One of the reasons the American effort in Iraq is unsustainable is that the American people know very little about the Iraqi people and their culture, and in most cases couldn't care less. The war in Iraq was sold as a response to Sept. 11. As it slowly dawns on a majority of Americans that the link was bogus, and that there is no benefit to the U.S. from this war, only endless grief, the political support will all but vanish.
(This could take awhile. In a poll done for Newsweek magazine this week, 42 percent of the respondents continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.)
We've put our troops in Iraq in an impossible situation. If you are not permitted to win a war, eventually you will lose it. In Vietnam, for a variety of reasons, the U.S. never waged total war, although the enemy did. After several years and more than 58,000 deaths, we quit.
We won't - and shouldn't - wage total war in Iraq, either. But to the insurgents, the Americans epitomize evil. We're the crazed foreigners who invaded their country and killed innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, by the thousands. We call that collateral damage. They call it murder. For them, this is total war.
President Bush never prepared the nation for the prolonged violence of this war. He still hasn't spoken candidly about it. If he has an idea for hauling us out of this quagmire, he hasn't bothered to reveal it.
The troops who are fighting and dying deserve better.
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September 10, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Dishonesty Thing
By PAUL KRUGMAN
t's the dishonesty, stupid. The real issue in the National Guard story isn't what George W. Bush did three decades ago. It's the recent pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't, the White House's repeated claims that it had released all of the relevant documents when it hadn't.
It's the same pattern of dishonesty, this time involving personal matters that the public can easily understand, that some of us have long seen on policy issues, from global warming to the war in Iraq. On budget matters, which is where I came in, serious analysts now take administration dishonesty for granted.
It wasn't always that way. Three years ago, those of us who accused the administration of cooking the budget books were ourselves accused, by moderates as well as by Bush loyalists, of being "shrill." These days the coalition of the shrill has widened to include almost every independent budget expert.
For example, back in February the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities accused the Bush administration of, in effect, playing three-card monte with budget forecasts. It pointed out that the administration's deficit forecast was far above those of independent analysts, and suggested that this exaggeration was deliberate.
"Overstating the 2004 deficit," the center wrote, "could allow the president to announce significant 'progress' on the deficit in late October - shortly before Election Day - when the Treasury Department announces the final figures."
Was this a wild accusation from a liberal think tank? No, it's conventional wisdom among experts. Two months ago Stanley Collender, a respected nonpartisan analyst, warned: "At some point over the next few weeks, the Office of Management and Budget will release the administration's midsession budget review and try to convince everyone the federal deficit is falling. Don't believe them."
He went on to echo the center's analysis. The administration's standard procedure, he said, is to initially issue an unrealistically high deficit forecast, which is "politically motivated or just plain bad." Then, when the actual number comes in below the forecast, officials declare that the deficit is falling, even though it's higher than the previous year's deficit.
Goldman Sachs says the same. Last month one of its analysts wrote that "the Office of Management and Budget has perfected the art of underpromising and overperforming in terms of its near-term budget deficit forecasts. This creates the impression that the deficit is narrowing when, in fact, it will be up sharply."
In other words, many reputable analysts think that the Bush administration routinely fakes even its short-term budget forecasts for the purposes of political spin. And the fakery in its long-term forecasts is much worse.
The administration claims to have a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years. But even Bruce Bartlett, a longtime tax-cut advocate, points out that "projections showing deficits falling assume that Bush's tax cuts expire on schedule." But Mr. Bush wants those tax cuts made permanent. That is, the administration has a "plan" to reduce the deficit that depends on Congress's not passing its own legislation.
Sounding definitely shrill, Mr. Bartlett says that "anyone who thinks we can overcome our fiscal mess without higher taxes is in denial." Far from backing down on his tax cuts, however, Mr. Bush is proposing to push the budget much deeper into the red with privatization programs that purport to offer something for nothing.
As Newsweek's Allan Sloan writes, "The president didn't exactly burden us with details about paying for all this. It's great marketing: show your audience the goodies but not the price tag. It's like going to the supermarket, picking out your stuff and taking it home without stopping at the checkout line to pay. The bill? That will come later."
Longtime readers will remember that that's exactly what I said, shrilly, about Mr. Bush's proposals during the 2000 campaign. Once again, he's running on the claim that 2 - 1 = 4.
So what's the real plan? Some not usually shrill people think that Mr. Bush will simply refuse to face reality until it comes crashing in: Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, says there's a 75 percent chance of a financial crisis in the next five years.
Nobody knows what Mr. Bush would really do about taxes and spending in a second term. What we do know is that on this, as on many matters, he won't tell the truth.
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