Who here *doesn't* believe that Obama is doomed?

Canyonman, do you understand the concept of "sunk costs"?

It's not too unusual for a corporation will undertake a major project, sink millions of dollars in it, and then at the last minute just walk away from it. Some people are completely baffled by this--"Why didn't you just finish the factory? Why didn't you just release the product?" Some people cannot accept that what's happened has happened.

Money spent is money gone forever--ditto for lives. Perhaps a better analogy would be trading--at any given time, you should focus on making the most money possible given your accepted risk. If you happen to lose a bunch of money one day, this shouldn't change your strategy one iota.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? The fact that we've come this far doesn't mean we HAVE to see Iraq through until the bloody civil-war end.

Of course, you don't agree it'll end that way so I guess the debate ends there.

All I know is that at this point there's no politically feasible way for us to make a difference anymore... the new Iraq is sovereign, we can't just yank it away and partition the country or anything, we can't win a propaganda war with religious zealots, and we can't wage brutal (i.e. effective) war without offending pretty much the entire world.

All we can do, it seems, is sit here and throw money and lives at it. "We can't stop now! We've invested too much already!"

Spoken like a trader who's about to blow up, no?

 

Slow down, and calm down. And sunk costs is a strategy for a loser, or a deceiver. Absolutuly no patience, especially long term, is not an answer that's conductive to success. This bad situation can be worked out without a pullout, but clearly not in your mind. So I wouldn't seek you out for operating solutions in this case.

Boots are on the grounds, society is disrupted, lives have been lost, folks are angry, and I need win-win solutions developed here. Cut and run sorta' slowly is not an option. The secret here is in security, stability, and childeren.

All of these are within the grasp. But they also need reduced world scrutiny to achieve a solid foundation to grow from. I don't want a nightly worldwide, press review of rebuilding strategies. It's not healthy to show me the new police patrols and law and order taking hold. Decades of distrust will lead to fights, short tempers and retribution. These are realities, but also the signs of growth.

The time directly after the civil war in this country could not have been an easy one to mend quickly either. Fortunately there was no CNN, FOX or some other antagonist ready to show the world the dirty laundry. I'd bet there was no public opinion polling data on anything there to shape world opinions about America and its internal strife. This country was unique, in a unique moment. We have only scant ideas of what it looked like. Such is now the position of Iraq.

They are at a thrilling and unique time and place. No clue what to do. Learning how to walk. And yes, on our dime! With our blood!! The time is approaching when the training wheels from America will be removed. They'll have to ride unattached, but they will not be unattended. We've got to commit to be there for a time. Get over it!!

And honestly, it's really not a debate here. It's more of an attempt to get YOU to understand that WE'RE GOING TO BE THERE!! Be pissed, write protest papers, blog for days. But know, we'll be there and in numbers. Reality sometimes is a pain, but it is reality. And rather than rile, why not attempt to find some good from the encounters.

As I have said time and time again, we can attack the true weapon, the children of Iraq. We can poison their minds with the venom of hope and inspiration. Cut off the insurgent bastards at the knees. Mess up the training pool. Further, I would advise the country to embark on a major infrastructure building program. Waterworks, electrical plants, and most importantly a major interstate highway project would provide self-growth that would spur the national unity that makes a recovery more possible. I'd have them too busy living to be in any monkey business.

And here's the real issue, it's not the Iraqis people that we are having issues with. Let's face it, I am just too positive about the long term potential here. Here ya' go. I would have taken a few hundred million and did a private placement in the electric company, floated a bond issue for the water company, dumped a bit into the phone company, completely redo one of the better hospitals, and then looked into a few choice areas to set up a few parks for the citizens. I would have asked the Army core of engineers to help out with the new roadway planning too! Maybe even took $20,000,000 to build that new stock trading and grain exchange building. While we're there and have their attention, let's grow them away from the terror solutions.

 

And to directly address this piece. My buddy purchased a set of Unisys semiconductor buildings for basically pennies on the dollar many moons ago.

I have another group of associates in NY who are hard money lenders and they get involved in these types of ventures regularly. That still does not make it a smart move for these corporations. And it's not the soundest of things to do to entice shareholder confidence either!

 

nice ad hominem attack...lack of experience???Thats bs...no president had great experience...jfk?clinton?bush???look at what experience got us for the last 8yrs...Just because your a 70yr old doesnt mean your competent or have worthy experience.Mccain is showing extreme stupidity in continuiing bush policy.
We cant afford anymore cowboys.

I beleive people who say he has scary associations,lacks experience,liberal bs,are the same people who really cant stand blacks but are too pc to say it.

 

After 9/11 It was clear. The era of strongman dictatorships was over.

For the cold war this was the perfered policy of the US....better to have a strong dictator on our side as a worldwide front against the CCCP. This US policy was sucessful it did help keep the soviets out of many countries especialy the middle east. It was brutal to some residents in those countries. But overall they fared better then countries under the Iron curtian.

9/11 now showed we need to rid these dictators. That is the purpose of this war. Iraq, Afghan, Syria, Iran...then Saudia

This will be a 25-50 year policy....or untill the oil is gone

 

"9/11 now showed we need to rid these dictators. That is the purpose of this war. Iraq, Afghan, Syria, Iran...then Saudia This will be a 25-50 year policy....or untill the oil is gone...""


And who's going to pay for this?We're already 3 trillion in the hole for this failed misadventure and you propose staying this course for another 50 years?
Wow,the terrorists will succeed in bankrupting us if we keep listening to the war nuts.

The middle east has been a mess for many years.Read some history.

9 11 WASNT perpetrated by any dictator.
Even bush concedes that.Why and how do right wingers continue to harbor on long ago dismissed conspiracy theories is such extreme ignorance and stupidity.
Actually,If anything does us in it is continuiing this failed war mongering that has garnered 0 results.
This is just basic logic which is so lacking it seems.

 

Your blatant inaccuracies don't help buttress your argument. The cost of the war in Iraq has been one sixth of “3 trillion.”

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home

 

“Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?' They hate what we see right here in this chamber: a democratically-elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

---President George W. Bush---

When, exactly, did this happen? How did this mindless conflation – of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘values’ with the events of 9/11 – occur? Perhaps most importantly of all, why did we allow it to happen instead of crying foul as soon as it was first brought up?

If we are to learn any lessons from 9/11, and if the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent people are not to be in vain, we must be very cautious in assessing exactly why the attacks occurred. Dismissing them as the work of suicidal fundamentalist maniacs, hell-bent on ascending to some kind of notional paradise and motivated by nothing more than an irrational hatred of Western values, may be the simple and convenient way out; however, it also smacks of intellectual cowardice, self-righteous bluster and a latent disregard for the truth.

There are several reasons why the asinine “They hate us for our freedoms!” gibberish has been allowed to flourish – even though now, nearly six years after September 11, 2001, few astute onlookers actually believe it – and they’re well worth enumerating here as the anniversary of the attacks approaches.

The first problem lies with George W. Bush himself and his oft-lamented lack of mental agility. To my mind, there are two basic possibilities at hand: firstly, Bush may understand that the events of 9/11 have rather more complex antecedents than simple freedom-hating, but he is just too stupid to comprehend them fully; or, secondly, that he truly believes his own rhetoric in this regard. If the former is true then it’s safe to assume that his speechwriters – who, following the ‘election’ of Dubya in 2000, had to figure out a way of dumbing-down their output in order to render it suitable for a president who is incapable of uttering anything of more than ten syllables in length without the aid of phonetic cue-cards – came up with the ‘freedom’ angle as a form of political soundbite, the kind of trite over-simplification with which even Bush could deal. If the latter applies, it’s far more likely that Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld and co. simply told Bush that “the terrorists hate our freedoms”, aware that attempting to explain anything more complicated would probably necessitate the use of a sock-puppet and a can of Alphabetti Spaghetti.

Had Bush been less lacking in the IQ department, we may never have been force-fed this trivial nonsense about freedom-hating terrorists who resent our way of life. As things stood, however, it was inevitable that the whole complicated issue would have to be simplified for Bush’s consumption, a process which then infected the world as a whole.

A second problem lies with the covert nature of post-Vietnam US foreign policy. Chalmers Johnson, a CIA consultant between 1967 and 1973 and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, was interviewed by Eugene Jarecki for his 2005 documentary Why We Fight. Here’s what he had to say:

“Blowback. It’s a CIA term. ‘Blowback’ does not mean simply the unintended consequences of foreign operations; it means the unintended consequences of foreign operations that were deliberately kept secret from the American public, so that, when the retaliation comes, the American people is not able to put it in context, to put cause and effect together. Then they come up with questions, like, ‘Why do they hate us?’ Our government did not want the forensic question asked, ‘What were their motives?’, and instead chose to say ‘They were just evildoers.’”

The term ‘blowback’ – first deployed in March 1954 in a (recently declassified) CIA report and pertaining to an operation geared towards overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh’s Iranian government the previous year – is instructive. Indeed, such covert operations, hidden from the view of the American public after the interventionist PR nightmare that was the Vietnam War, lie at the heart of the 9/11 issue.

The aforementioned operation, along with many others, served to cement the USA’s reputation in the Muslim world as a loathed and implacable enemy; the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia, propping up an oppressive regime in one of the holiest Muslim lands, was the final straw. It was all but inevitable, then, that some form of retaliation would ensue… and so it proved. Castigatory attacks upon American embassies and military targets became the norm during the 1980s and 1990s, but 9/11 represented the ultimate realisation of the al-Qaeda ideal. Thanks to the clandestine manner in which the USA perpetrated their policies, however, the public was willing to buy into the ‘freedom-hating’ spiel in lieu of a more obvious, more legitimate explanation for these assaults. Indeed, American public support for their government was at an all-time high following 9/11, a fact which Bush exploited to the hilt when mapping out his ‘War on Terrorism’.

A third key issue in understanding 9/11 and its aftermath must lie at the door of New Labour. When Bush espouses a point of view, his speech littered with clumsy malapropisms and laced with that perpetual redneck drawl, intelligent people of all ages, shapes, colours and sizes remain unconvinced; however, when a well-educated and infinitely more eloquent man such as Tony Blair repeats the same sentiments, they appear to have a far greater sense of validity, superficially-speaking. Accordingly, when Blair proved himself willing to repeat Bush’s crude and one-dimensional claptrap parrot-fashion, the idea of shadowy cartoon villains, dwelling in caves and hating us for our freedoms, didn’t seem quite so ridiculous to some. Blair must, therefore, bear some of the culpability for a catalogue of idiotic pronouncements which must, in truth, have made the Oxford-educated Prime Minister wince with embarrassment.

Fourthly, bin Laden himself has to accept a portion of the blame for this crass state of affairs. Admittedly, he does make some effort in his videotaped messages to explain the role played by US foreign policy in bringing about the attacks he sponsors, and last year’s referencing of William Blum’s excellent book Rogue State was a particularly unique way of drawing attention to this factor, but all too often he descends into the same over-the-top speechifying which marks Dubya’s public addresses. People may be less inclined to buy into Blair and Bush’s pseudo-explanations for events like 9/11 if their perpetrators were clearer about their motives, but the excessive religious dogma of which OBL is so fond tends to render his (few) reasonable points utterly moot.

Quite aside from anything else, as both Bill Maher and David Cross have been quick to point out, if the terrorists really hated ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ then the Netherlands – to use Cross’s pithy phrase – “would be fucking dust” by now. American society is not the beacon of autonomy which George W. Bush and his ilk like to proclaim. It never has been, in truth, but it has probably never been further from this naïve ideal than it is today, courtesy of the Patriot Act and sundry similar draconian measures undertaken by the neocon incumbents. Why would America be the target of the terrorists’ ire if freedom were the only thing they hated, when there are many nations across the globe which enjoy a far greater degree of actual liberty? It just doesn’t make sense.

 

Having covered the fraudulent reasons given by our leaders for the events of 9/11 and the hatred felt for Westerners by Islamic fundamentalists, let’s briefly examine some of the actual grounds upon which their antipathy was built.

I’ve already mentioned the colossal role played by US foreign policy in bringing about this state of play, so rather than explaining why it’s so bad I’ll just list a few of the most egregious examples thereof, in addition to those described above. For instance, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which prompted the USA to provide financial and tactical support to mujahideen rebels until the Soviet forces were defeated, the American leaders soon removed their support and left the country a devastated wreck. Osama bin Laden, one of the rebel leaders who had benefited from CIA assistance, was infuriated, and the seeds of 9/11 were irrepairably sown. In addition to the aforementioned military presence in Saudi Arabia and the ongoing interference in Middle Eastern affairs, especially those of Iran and Iraq, this is perhaps the most significant cause of anti-Western sentiment on the part of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Let’s not forget the August 1998 bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, partly motivated by alleged (and still unproven) ties between the plant’s owners and al-Qaeda, which caused unimaginable suffering to the people of the region who were denied access to fundamental medical supplies as a result of the attack.

One must also acknowledge the pernicious influence of hard-line Islam, which dictates the need for holy war in order to convert all apostates to the teachings of Allah and the Prophet Mohammad. While this extremist attitude is by no means common to all Muslims – and while it will never equate to anything as trivial as freedom-hating, no matter how often Blair and Bush try to claim otherwise – it does serve to explain, at least to some extent, the reasoning behind attacks such as those carried out on 9/11. As long as there are those who seek to enforce these fundamentalist ideas, there will be terrorist atrocities.

These didactic crusaders may not be overly-keen on freedom, at least in the sense of women’s rights and the ability to choose one’s religious beliefs (or lack thereof), but the issue runs far, far deeper than Bush’s spin-laden soundbites would suggest and it’s simply ignorant to imply otherwise. Besides, are the fundamentalist Muslims really any more or less objectionable than the fundamentalist Christians who currently dominate the USA, led by Bush himself and manifested in other repugnant personalities such as Ann Coulter and her ilk? Let us pause to consider this quote from George Bush Senior, made at a formal news conference in Chicago, IL, on August 27, 1987:

“I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

What, really, is the fundamental – no pun intended – difference between George H. W. Bush’s ill-disguised intolerance and that espoused by, say, bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri or the (now-deceased) Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Admittedly, there are degrees of fundamentalism and, when last I checked, Bush hadn’t hijacked a plane in a suicidal bid to force his bigoted beliefs upon others, but one has to acknowledge that the conflicts being fought across the globe today are, first and foremost, religious in nature. This isn’t a case of democracy vs. totalitarianism, or freedom vs. oppression; it’s a case of two different sets of rigid and pious ideologues facing off against one another over who has the best imaginary friend in the sky. Really, at this stage of our species’ evolution, that’s beyond sad.

Before you put fingers to keyboards and send a few bits of ill-thought-out hatemail in my direction, please be aware that I in no way condone the cowardly mass-murder perpetuated by al-Qaeda on 9/11, any more than I condone the subsequent invasion of Iraq or the sectarian civil war which has erupted in the war-torn country since Blair and Bush sent in their troops. (Indeed, I condemn all these events in the strongest possible terms, this being no place for moral ambivalence.) I do feel, however, that this simplistic ‘freedom-hating’ nonsense is an insult to those who died, to their families and friends and to us, the people who have already been asked to support two wars as a result of what happened that fateful day (with another one on the horizon, if Bush’s constant sabre-rattling with Iran is anything by which to go).

As the sixth anniversary of the attacks is fast approaching, we could do worse than remind ourselves of the issues which led to the deaths of 2,972 blameless civilians – issues which, incidentally, are more rife today than ever before – and avoid allowing ourselves to be swayed by the childish rhetoric espoused by New Labour and the Bush administration.

http://www.simonguildford.com/They_Hate_Us_for_Our_Freedoms.html

 

(Past his prime sounds like he could have worked for Arthur Anderson doing work for Enron and WorldCom)

The Iraq War Will Cost Us $3 Trillion, and Much More

By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz
Sunday, March 9, 2008; B01

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no such thing as a free war. The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can't spend $3 trillion -- yes, $3 trillion -- on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home.

Some people will scoff at that number, but we've done the math. Senior Bush administration aides certainly pooh-poohed worrisome estimates in the run-up to the war. Former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey reckoned that the conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later called his estimate "baloney." Administration officials insisted that the costs would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion. In April 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, the thoughtful head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said on "Nightline" that reconstructing Iraq would cost the American taxpayer just $1.7 billion. Ted Koppel, in disbelief, pressed Natsios on the question, but Natsios stuck to his guns. Others in the administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, hoped that U.S. partners would chip in, as they had in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, or that Iraq's oil would pay for the damages.

The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is not only the second longest war in U.S. history (after Vietnam), it is also the second most costly -- surpassed only by World War II.

Why doesn't the public understand the staggering scale of our expenditures? In part because the administration talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is apparently still an emergency five years after the war began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now running at $12 billion a month -- $16 billion if you include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we'll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.

But the costs to our society and economy are far greater. When a young soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, his or her family will receive a U.S. government check for just $500,000 (combining life insurance with a "death gratuity") -- far less than the typical amount paid by insurance companies for the death of a young person in a car accident. The stark "budgetary cost" of $500,000 is clearly only a fraction of the total cost society pays for the loss of life -- and no one can ever really compensate the families. Moreover, disability pay seldom provides adequate compensation for wounded troops or their families. Indeed, in one out of five cases of seriously injured soldiers, someone in their family has to give up a job to take care of them.

But beyond this is the cost to the already sputtering U.S. economy. All told, the bill for the Iraq war is likely to top $3 trillion. And that's a conservative estimate.

President Bush tried to sell the American people on the idea that we could have a war with little or no economic sacrifice. Even after the United States went to war, Bush and Congress cut taxes, especially on the rich -- even though the United States already had a massive deficit. So the war had to be funded by more borrowing. By the end of the Bush administration, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the cumulative interest on the increased borrowing used to fund them, will have added about $1 trillion to the national debt.

The long-term burden of paying for the conflicts will curtail the country's ability to tackle other urgent problems, no matter who wins the presidency in November. Our vast and growing indebtedness inevitably makes it harder to afford new health-care plans, make large-scale repairs to crumbling roads and bridges, or build better-equipped schools. Already, the escalating cost of the wars has crowded out spending on virtually all other discretionary federal programs, including the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal aid to states and cities, all of which have been scaled back significantly since the invasion of Iraq.

To make matters worse, the U.S. economy is facing a recession. But our ability to implement a truly effective economic-stimulus package is crimped by expenditures of close to $200 billion on the two wars this year alone and by a skyrocketing national debt.

The United States is a rich and strong country, but even rich and strong countries squander trillions of dollars at their peril. Think what a difference $3 trillion could make for so many of the United States' -- or the world's -- problems. We could have had a Marshall Plan to help desperately poor countries, winning the hearts and maybe the minds of Muslim nations now gripped by anti-Americanism. In a world with millions of illiterate children, we could have achieved literacy for all -- for less than the price of a month's combat in Iraq. We worry about China's growing influence in Africa, but the upfront cost of a month of fighting in Iraq would pay for more than doubling our annual current aid spending on Africa.

Closer to home, we could have funded countless schools to give children locked in the underclass a shot at decent lives. Or we could have tackled the massive problem of Social Security, which Bush began his second term hoping to address; for far, far less than the cost of the war, we could have ensured the solvency of Social Security for the next half a century or more.

Economists used to think that wars were good for the economy, a notion born out of memories of how the massive spending of World War II helped bring the United States and the world out of the Great Depression. But we now know far better ways to stimulate an economy -- ways that quickly improve citizens' well-being and lay the foundations for future growth. But money spent paying Nepalese workers in Iraq (or even Iraqi ones) doesn't stimulate the U.S. economy the way that money spent at home would -- and it certainly doesn't provide the basis for long-term growth the way investments in research, education or infrastructure would.

Another worry: This war has been particularly hard on the economy because it led to a spike in oil prices. Before the 2003 invasion, oil cost less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around there. (Yes, China and India were growing by leaps and bounds, but cheap supplies from the Middle East were expected to meet their demands.) The war changed that equation, and oil prices recently topped $100 per barrel.

While Washington has been spending well beyond its means, others have been saving -- including the oil-rich countries that, like the oil companies, have been among the few winners of this war. No wonder, then, that China, Singapore and many Persian Gulf emirates have become lenders of last resort for troubled Wall Street banks, plowing in billions of dollars to shore up Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other firms that burned their fingers on subprime mortgages. How long will it be before the huge sovereign wealth funds controlled by these countries begin buying up large shares of other U.S. assets?

The Bush team, then, is not merely handing over the war to the next administration; it is also bequeathing deep economic problems that have been seriously exacerbated by reckless war financing. We face an economic downturn that's likely to be the worst in more than a quarter-century.

Until recently, many marveled at the way the United States could spend hundreds of billions of dollars on oil and blow through hundreds of billions more in Iraq with what seemed to be strikingly little short-run impact on the economy. But there's no great mystery here. The economy's weaknesses were concealed by the Federal Reserve, which pumped in liquidity, and by regulators that looked away as loans were handed out well beyond borrowers' ability to repay them. Meanwhile, banks and credit-rating agencies pretended that financial alchemy could convert bad mortgages into AAA assets, and the Fed looked the other way as the U.S. household-savings rate plummeted to zero.

It's a bleak picture. The total loss from this economic downturn -- measured by the disparity between the economy's actual output and its potential output -- is likely to be the greatest since the Great Depression. That total, itself well in excess of $1 trillion, is not included in our estimated $3 trillion cost of the war.

Others will have to work out the geopolitics, but the economics here are clear. Ending the war, or at least moving rapidly to wind it down, would yield major economic dividends.

As we head toward November, opinion polls say that voters' main worry is now the economy, not the war. But there's no way to disentangle the two. The United States will be paying the price of Iraq for decades to come. The price tag will be all the greater because we tried to ignore the laws of economics -- and the cost will grow the longer we remain.