Category: Uncategorized

Huh:

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

What the article doesn’t mention is that apparently they also found no evidence that Saddam’s regime attempted to kill George H.W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993. Nor has there been any mention of such evidence anywhere else since the invasion. All this despite the fact that we can be certain if the administration had found it, they would have let us know loudly and often.

Meanwhile, all of Washington has become discreetly mum about this, even though they were yammering about it constantly from fall, 2002 through spring, 2003. It’s almost as though none of it ever happened.

A cartoon like this one is going to inevitably inspire debate about the accuracy of the numbers, so here’s how I came up with mine.

1. Estimated cost of war $10 billion a month:

“In FY2007, DOD’s monthly obligations for contracts and pay averaged about $12.3 billion including about $10.3 billion for Iraq and $2.0 billion for Afghanistan.” [CRS Report, 2/22/08]

2. $10 billion divided by 30 days in a month comes out to $333,333,333 a day. Divided by the number of seconds in a day (86,400) = $3858 a second.

3. Total final cost of war $3 trillion. That estimate comes from “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” which is discussed here. Same source for the figures about Social Security and children’s health care, though one thing that I should have made clearer — the figure regarding children’s health care indicates what could have been done with this sum with plenty left over:

By way of context, Stiglitz and Bilmes list what even one of these trillions could have paid for: 8 million housing units, or 15 million public school teachers, or healthcare for 530 million children for a year, or scholarships to university for 43 million students. Three trillion could have fixed America’s social security problem for half a century. America, says Stiglitz, is currently spending $5bn a year in Africa, and worrying about being outflanked by China there: “Five billion is roughly 10 days’ fighting, so you get a new metric of thinking about everything.”

4. Avg distance to moon = 238,907 miles x 5,280 ft/mi = 1,261,428,960 ft to moon x 12 inches = 15,137,147,520 inches to moon, divided by 6.14 inches (length of dollar) = 2,465,333,472 dollar bills end-to-end to reach the moon one-way

Mulitplied by two: 4,930,666,944 dollar bills end-to-end for a round trip to the moon.

Three trillion divided by 4,930,666,944 = 608 round trips to moon

(This site was extremely helpful in figuring out this last bit.)

Any errors are of course mine alone, and still entirely possible, given that I am a right-brained, math-challenged cartoonist.

I sent out next week’s cartoon with a pretty blatant mistake — I had to make a last-minute revision and in my haste inadvertently dropped three zeroes from the daily cost of the war. Oops. The strip runs in Pittsburgh on Saturdays, so to readers there, all I can say is, my bad. With luck, the corrected version should run everywhere else next week. (If you happen to work somewhere that runs my strip, please point this out to your art director or production manager and make sure you’re not running the earlier version.)

You may have heard the new Esquire article about Admiral William Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command, presents him as a hero for standing up to Bush’s desire to attack Iran. Chris Floyd points out the portrayal of Fallon’s perspective is actually a little more complicated:

Fallon himself has long denied the story which had him declaring, upon taking over Central Command, that a war on Iran “isn’t going to happen on my watch.” And in fact, the article itself depicts Fallon’s true attitude toward the idea of an attack on Iran right up front, in his own words. After noting Fallon’s concerns about focusing too much on Iran to the exclusion of the other “pots boiling over” in the region, Barnett nevertheless keeps pressing the point the point and asks: “And if it comes to war?” Fallon replies with stark, brutal clarity:

“Get serious,” the admiral says. “These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.”

The article makes clear that Fallon’s main concerns about a war with Iran are, as noted, about tactics and timing: Sure, when the time comes – no shuffling on that point – we’ll crush these subhumans like the insects they are; but we’ve already got a lot on our plate at the moment, so why not hold off as long as we can?

The rest.

Above is a picture of Nguyen Cao Ky huddling with Lyndon Johnson. Ky was one of our main Vietnamese lackeys during the midsixties, first as Air Marshall and then as Prime Minister.

Therefore, from the perspective of the U.S. media, he was someone to gush over. This CBS News segment appears in an obscure documentary about I.F. Stone

CRONKITE: Air Force Marshall Ky is a dynamic man—at 34, said to be one of the best public speakers in Vietnam. He gets to work around 7:30 in the morning, works late at night. He has broken the habits of siestas, there is none here. He doesn’t even go out to lunch, but like an American businessman, he eats off the corner of his desk. Ky is a hero to the Vietnamese people. We had an opportunity to talk to him today.

KY: We need more American troops, allied troops.

From the same period, here’s General Ky speaking in an interview with the London Sunday Mirror:

KY: People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one—Hitler. I admire Hitler because he pulled his country together when it was in a terrible state.

God damn that god damn liberal media!

In any case, this is why I say that Ahmadinejad’s statements about wiping Israel off the map (whether he said exactly that or not) have nothing to do with our policy toward Iran. All that matters is whether you take orders. If you do, you’re free to say or do anything you want. Grow a Hitler ‘stache while eating Hitler-flavored ice cream and screaming “I WANT TO BE THE HITLERIST HITLER OF ALL” and it’s perfectly okay. Knock yourself out.

(The Ky-Hitler quote appears in the documentary, but I was also reminded of it by Rick Perlstein.)