Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
SOURCE: The Nation (12-10-12)
Ricky Kreitner is an editorial intern for The Nation. Write to him at richard.kreitner@gmail.com.
The most politically radical character in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is also, not accidentally, the most entertaining. A reliable source of comic relief in a film weighed down with false notes of levity, Thaddeus Stevens (played expertly and judiciously by Tommy Lee Jones) is an unrepentantly radical congressman from Pennsylvania whose fierce commitment to racial equality is surpassed only by his commitment to rhetorically eviscerating those with a different opinion. “You fatuous nincompoop,” he roars at one pro-slavery Democrat. “You insult God!”
In some ways, Lincoln portrays Stevens as a man of great personal integrity and admirable core principles. He is, of course, the only character—the titular hero included—in a film about the political battle to pass the Thirteenth Amendment who comes close to advocating the modern consensus opinion on civil rights. And by depicting Stevens’s open-secret relationship with Lydia Hamilton Smith, his black housekeeper—friends referred to her, without derision, as “Mrs. Stevens”—the film accurately presents the congressman’s views on slavery and civil rights as the product of a lifelong crusade, one less political than personal.
But there’s more to the story, as it is this aspect of Stevens that supposedly prevents the Great Emancipator from ending slavery. It’s only when the radical finally compromises his deepest principles that he wins the full applause of Spielberg and John Williams, composer of the film’s predictably saccharine score—and, therefore, that of the audience. Before his highly anticipated speech supporting the Thirteenth Amendment, fellow Republicans implore Stevens to drop all references to “equality of the races” in favor of the more conservative and popular formulation “equality before the law.” Whereas the former scandalously implied broader social consequences, the more narrow formulation would have only codified egalitarianism, allowing racists to preserve de facto segregation, as they ably did for another century and more. Had Stevens, in his speech during the amendment fight, declared his belief in racial equality, he would have scared away conservative votes and destroyed Spielberg’s plans for an implausibly climactic roll call. We sense Stevens’s anger while forcing himself to explicitly deny his belief in racial equality under questioning from the absurd (not to mention bizarrely British-sounding) Representative Fernando Wood of New York. But Spielberg and screenwriter (and Nation editorial board member) Tony Kushner compensate for that anger in every way cinematically possible, indicating to the audience that this is a great moment for Stevens, for black Americans and—hooray!—for the country....
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SOURCE: National Interest (12-13-12)
Nikolas K. Gvosdev, a senior editor at The National Interest, is a professor of national-security studies at the U.S. Naval War College.
In the wake of the 2012 election, it is clear that there has been a sea change in the perceptions of the American electorate on which party is the better steward of the country’s national-security interests. Traditionally, Republican candidates had always enjoyed a so-called "national-security advantage" (at least in those elections where foreign and defense policies were major issues). Only a short eight years ago, George W. Bush enjoyed a eighteen-point lead over John Kerry when exit polls asked voters to rate who they trusted to wage the "war on terror" more effectively, and of those voters who made national security a voting issue, sixty percent favored the Republican incumbent. No longer.
The November 2012 Rasmussen report now gives Democrats the edge when the question is posed as to which party is better equipped to deal with national security. Veterans and active duty military are more likely to split their votes rather than acting as a reliably Republican voting bloc, as occurred in other recent past elections. Exit polling after the 2012 campaign concluded suggested that President Barack Obama and his challenger, Governor Mitt Romney, polled "equally on national security" and that voters "trusted the president 11 points more on the broader category of international affairs." Peter Beinart concluded that, in winning reelection, Obama has "broken the GOP’s decades-old advantage on foreign affairs."
What is clear, however, is that this shift has not been generated by any particular new vision of foreign affairs being proffered by the Democrats. Most commentators have noted the high degree in continuity in national-security affairs between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Many of the signature achievements of the current administration, such as "resetting" relations with Russia, could have come verbatim from the foreign-policy playbook utilized by the national-security team of Jim Baker, Brent Scowcroft and President George H.W. Bush. Notwithstanding the use of buzzwords like "smart power," Democrats have filled the long-standing national-security gap with Republicans not by offering an alternative vision for international affairs, but by demonstrating to voters greater competence in executing foreign policy—and successfully framing Republicans as reckless and irresponsible when it comes to national security...
SOURCE: The European (12-12-12)
Stefano Casertano is an international politics expert, author and journalist residing in Berlin, with a focus on global economics and energy affairs.
The only reason why Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi did not stick with his super-presidential decree has been the presence of the military. In November, Morsi sought to seize near-absolute power for himself, claiming that this was required to "complete the revolutionary process." The proposed decree stated that a presidential action was exempt from oversight or scrutiny by other institutions, like the judiciary. Egyptian secularists decried the move as a tactical maneuver to introduce a full-fledged Islamist constitution, or as a way for Morsi to secure his position by use of dictatorial power. The secular (and Coptic Christian) opposition gathered in Tahrir Square to call for the revoking of the "super powers."
Clashes between secularists and Morsi’s supporters soon broke out. The military reacted by asserting that "they did not want to intervene in a political matter between opposed factions." Yet two things became clear very soon: first, the military is still the only force capable of guaranteeing order. As Rami G. Khouri suggested in The Daily Star, Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood are still relatively inexperienced "amateurs" that easily lost control of the square. Second, an agreement with the military could have been worse for Morsi and his allies than negotiating a truce with the opposition. In the end, the president opted to retire his proposed decree.
Yet we cannot dismiss the events in Cairo as an isolated story. Morsi’s aspiration to absolute power may be the signal of a new, overarching tendency: that of "Islamist dictatorships...
SOURCE: Spectator (UK) (12-15-17)
Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: an Economic History of the United States and a columnist for Salon.
More than half a decade has passed since the recession that triggered the financial panic and the Great Recession, but the condition of the world continues to be summed up by what I’ve called ‘turboparalysis’ — a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and the wheels spin but the vehicle refuses to move.
The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression might have been expected to produce revolutions in politics and the world of ideas alike. Outside of the Arab world, however, revolutions are hard to find. Mass unemployment and austerity policies have caused riots in Greece and Spain, but most developed nations are remarkably sedate. Scandal and sputtering economic growth appear unlikely to prevent another peaceful transition of power within the Communist party of China. And in the US, the re-election of President Obama and the strengthening of his Democratic party in the US Senate reflect long-term demographic changes in an increasingly non-white and secular American electorate, not the endorsement of a bold agenda for the future by the Democrats. They don’t have one.
In the realm of ideas, turboparalysis is even more striking. On both sides of the Atlantic, political and economic debate proceed as though the bursting of the global bubble economy did not discredit any school of thought. Right, left and centre, the players are the same and so are their familiar moves. Public debate is dominated by the same three groups — market fundamentalists, centrist neoliberals, and mildly reformist social democrats — who have been debating one another since the 1980s. Someone who went to sleep like Rip Van Winkle in the 1980s when Reagan and Thatcher were in power and awoke today would find nothing new in the way of economic theories or political doctrines.
By now one might have expected the emergence of innovative and taboo-breaking schools of thought seeking to account for and respond to the global crisis. But to date there is no insurgent political and intellectual left, nor a new right, for that matter. In the US, the militant Tea Party right, many of whose candidates went down to defeat in this year’s elections, represents the last gasp of the Goldwater-Reagan coalition, not something fresh. The American centre-left under Obama is intellectually exhausted and politically feeble, reduced to rebranding as ‘progressive’ policies like the individual mandate system (‘Obamacare’) and tax cuts for the middle class which originated on the moderate right a generation ago. In Britain, the manifestos of various ‘colour revolutions’ — Blue Labour, Red Tory and so on — have the feel of PR brochures promoting rival cliques of ambitious apparatchiks rather than the epochal thinking the times require.
Why has a global calamity produced so little political change and, at the same time, so little rethinking?..
SOURCE: Jerusalem Post (12-10-12)
The writer is an Egyptian citizen. His name has been changed to protect his identity.
The political atmosphere in Egypt today closely resembles that experienced in Germany 1933 after the accession to power of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party in an equally narrow democratic electoral victory.
Both Hitler and ex-inmate Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi show the same desire for revenge against the established social order and intolerance toward adversaries. During the past six months Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood have taken all necessary measures to consolidate his grasp on power, matching similar measures taken by Hitler in 1933 including controlling all media, the army, local municipalities, police force and jurisdictional institutions, appointing allies to key positions while viciously removing technocrats and bureaucratic employees who do not show complete obedience.
Accusations of corruption and loyalty to the old regime (of Honsi Mubarak) are readily used whenever the Brotherhood wishes to assert control, in an intense purging campaign. Most of these public employees accept the new reality silently to avoid public humiliation.
Every tree is known by its fruit, and no matter how much the Muslim Brotherhood portrays itself as benevolent and compassionate, the actions taken by its leaders and members parallel those of the Nazis...
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (12-12-12)
Chris McGreal is the Guardian's Washington correspondent.
The United States is allowing one tragic foreign policy failure to compound another.
Eighteen years ago, President Bill Clinton watched passively as the Hutu extremist regime in Rwanda oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. His administration refused even to utter the word genocide for fear it would oblige the US to intervene.
Clinton wasn't alone. One of the leaders of the Tutsi rebels fighting the genocidal regime told me at the time that during his attempts to persuade the UK government to intervene at the UN, he concluded that British officials regarded the Tutsi victims as little more than ants. The French spent their time trying to get the UN to authorise action that would have propped up the Hutu extremist leadership because they feared the alternative would diminish Paris's influence in central Africa.
The aftermath was a searing experience for Clinton, his Africa gurus and national security advisers – one of whom is now the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, who may well replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state – that has continued to shape American policy toward Rwanda. When the fighting ended, the true cost of western inaction was laid bare at the mass graves...
SOURCE: National Interest (12-11-12)
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.
The U.S. government has waged economic war against the Castro regime for half a century. The policy may have been worth a try during the Cold War, but the embargo has failed to liberate the Cuban people. It is time to end sanctions against Havana.
Decades ago the Castro brothers lead a revolt against a nasty authoritarian, Fulgencio Batista. After coming to power in 1959, they created a police state, targeted U.S. commerce, nationalized American assets, and allied with the Soviet Union. Although Cuba was but a small island nation, the Cold War magnified its perceived importance.
Washington reduced Cuban sugar import quotas in July 1960. Subsequently U.S. exports were limited, diplomatic ties were severed, travel was restricted, Cuban imports were banned, Havana’s American assets were frozen, and almost all travel to Cuba was banned. Washington also pressed its allies to impose sanctions.
These various measures had no evident effect, other than to intensify Cuba’s reliance on the Soviet Union. Yet the collapse of the latter nation had no impact on U.S. policy...
SOURCE: New Republic (12-7-12)
Paul Berman is a senior editor at The New Republic.
On December 10, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will bestow its Peace Prize upon the European Union, and the wisdom of the committee’s action ought to be obvious to every last creature on Earth. The European Union consists of 27 states containing roughly 500 million citizens, not all of whom are worthy recipients of the prize, given the Nazis in Greece, fascists in Hungary, Islamist gunmen in France, anti-immigrant demagogues and bigots in general almost everywhere, child molesters, and investors in Spanish real estate bubbles, not to mention the political leaders incapable of approving a sufficiently robust economic stimulus, and so forth, unto the uptick lately in Catalan nationalism. Most of those 500 million Europeans deserve their award, though.
Alfred Nobel, the unfortunate inventor of dynamite, died before he was able to articulate the logic for his prize, but no explanation was necessary. The history of Europe during the last four 400 years has been punctuated by one attempt after another to avoid a recurrence of the mother-tragedy of all European tragedies, which was the Thirty Years War back in the seventeenth century, together with the sundry other religious wars of the time. Europeans slaughtered each other for the purpose of imposing on the entire continent a single theological truth, which was going to be Catholicism, or Protestantism, or some variation, but was not going to be more than one of the above. And the agreements that brought the slaughters to an end, codified in the seventeenth century, rested on the tolerant principle of cuius regio, eius religio, meaning, the local religion will be whatever the local potentate says it is, and neighboring potentates should mind their own business.
This was a principle of renunciation. Europe agreed to give up on the ambition of discovering a single truth and set out instead to manage the multiple truths. Renunciation and muddling-through proved to be a success, within limits. During the 150 years that followed, European wars tended to be ritualized affairs fought by armies wearing colored jackets, as in sports, shooting at each other instead of at the bystanders. When the system broke down, it was only because the French Revolution had introduced a different dispute about right and wrong—instead of Catholicism versus Protestantism, a matter of feudalism versus post-feudalism. And when Napoleon was defeated and order was reestablished, the principles of peace conformed roughly to the same doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio as before, except extended this time to multiple sociopolitical systems (e.g., constitutional monarchy, bourgeois monarchy, multinational imperial paternalism, backward-looking czarist despotism, forward-looking French-style barricade-building, etc.).
The new peace lasted 99 years, with occasional interruptions and a giant massacre of the Paris Commune, not to mention the imperialist wars foisted on the rest of the world. Then it fell apart once again, this time because of yet another set of new ideas, having to do with idiotic nationalist resentments and mad theories about race. The Thirty Years War broke out anew. Or maybe the twentieth-century wars rested on a nihilist impulse to kill everyone in sight, akin to a disgruntled young person shooting up his high school or a movie theater, urged on by scurrilous ideologues.
The European Union of our own moment rests on a different principle altogether...
SOURCE: CNN.com (12-10-12)
Peter Bergen is a CNN national security analyst and author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad" and "The Longest War: America's Enduring Conflict with al-Qaeda," books that this story draws upon.
(CNN) -- "Zero Dark Thirty" is a likely shoo-in, deservedly, for Oscar nominations for best director (Kathryn Bigelow) and best screenplay (Mark Boal) and perhaps a slew of other categories....
Leaving aside its obvious merits as a film, how well does Zero Dark Thirty tell the complex tale of the decade-long hunt for bin Laden after 9/11? It's a valid question to ask since, after all, Bigelow told The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins, "What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film," and Boal told the Los Angeles Times, "I wanted to approach the story as a screenwriter but do the homework as a reporter."
The compelling story told in the film captures a lot that is true about the search for al Qaeda's leader but also distorts the story in ways that could give its likely audience of millions of Americans the misleading picture that coercive interrogation techniques used by the CIA on al Qaeda detainees -- such as waterboarding, physical abuse and sleep deprivation -- were essential to finding bin Laden....
SOURCE: Special to HNN (12-11-12)
Rich Rubino is the author of The Political Bible of Little Known Facts in American Politics and the Managing Editor of the political blog www.Politi-Geek.com. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and Communications from Assumption College, and a Master’s Degree in Broadcast Journalism from Emerson College. He currently works as the Social Media Coordinator for Support Popular Vote, a group working to change the way electoral votes are allocated within the Electoral College. Rubino writes a blog for Support Popular Vote: www.popularvoteblog.com. Previously, he has interviewed presidential candidates at the New Hampshire Primary and has served as an on-air panelist in New Hampshire providing political analysis on election night. He has also worked as a policy advisor on a gubernatorial campaign and on a Congressional campaign in Massachusetts. He has recently appeared on MSNBC, FOX News, Al-Jazeera and in The Huffington Post and The Detroit News.
President Barack Obama was recently elected to a second term, joining the elite club of two-term presidents, which includes the likes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. In sharp contrast to this, Joe Biden joined a club of two-term vice presidents who weren’t quite as prestigious. This club includes the likes of Daniel Tompkins, Thomas Riley Marshall, John Nance Garner, and Spiro Agnew.
The vice presidency is a very peculiar office. John Adams, the nation’s first Vice President, called the office “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived of his imagination conceived.” The only official duties of the vice president are to assume the office of the president in the event the president becomes incapacitated or dies, and to serve as president of the U.S. Senate. In that capacity, the vice president can preside over the U.S. Senate. However, the VP rarely presides over the Senate, delegating that duty to the Senate president pro tempore. He does, however, attend sessions wherein his vote would break a tie.
Over the past two centuries, the nation has had some very colorful vice presidents. One such vice president was Daniel D. Tompkins (1817-1825). Tompkins suffered from alcoholism which was thought to be the result of a decade-long struggle to get the U.S. Congress to reimburse him for money he used from his personal account to fund his state’s militia while he was governor of New York (he would often preside over the Senate drunk). Then there was Richard M. Johnson (1837-1841). Faced with financial turmoil, Johnson took a leave of absence from the vice presidency to open a tavern and spa.
In 2008 Barack Obama chose Joe Biden as his running mate to appeal to middle-class and blue-collar voters. Biden is the product of a middle-class upbringing and his orations often strike a resonant chord with middle- and working-class voters. Biden was also selected for his foreign policy prowess, having chaired the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
As vice president, Biden has been a loyal foot-soldier for Obama. He has been an ideological compatriot, fully supporting the administration’s agenda.
While it is considered commonplace today for the president and vice president to have a harmonious relationship, and see eye-to-eye on most major issues, this was not always the case. Charles Fairbanks for example was nominated as vice president in 1904 to complement Theodore Roosevelt. Fairbanks was an old guard conservative while Roosevelt hailed from the progressive bloodline of the Republican Party. Fairbanks opposed much of Roosevelt’s domestic agenda, which was known as “The Square Deal.” When Fairbanks sought the Republican presidential nomination to succeed Roosevelt in 1908, Roosevelt gave his coveted endorsement to his Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, who eventual won the Republican nomination.
President Calvin Coolidge and Vice President Charles G. Dawes also had an antagonistic relationship. It began in 1925 when both Coolidge and Dawes were inaugurated. At that time in history both the president and vice president gave inaugural addresses on the same day. Dawes’s inaugural address took the form of a fiery and controversial lecture about the fecklessness of the U.S. Senate rules. The press gave Dawes’s inaugural diatribe almost as much coverage as Coolidge’s inaugural address. Dawes added to the tension by sending the president a letter stating that he would not be attending Cabinet meetings.
Vice President John Nance Garner (1933-1941), who served with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a business-oriented Democrat from rural Texas. Garner came to think that Roosevelt had veered too far to the left ideologically. He even called his domestic programs “foolishness.” Vice President Garner sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1940, only to be resoundingly defeated by Roosevelt, and in turn, Roosevelt selected a new vice presidential running mate, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace.
Newly re-elected Vice President Joe Biden has hinted that he is likely to seek the Democratic Party nomination for the Presidency in 2016. However, unlike recent Vice Presidents George H.W. Bush and Al Gore, Biden is not the favorite of rank-and-file Democrats, nor is he the favorite of the party’s high command to succeed Obama. While it is true that most Democrats view Biden favorably, polls show U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be the overwhelming frontrunner, despite the fact that Biden has formidable favorability numbers (over 70 percent).
It is of particular interest to note that there is a striking similitude between Joe Biden and Alben Barkley, the vice president under Harry S. Truman. Like Biden, Barkley was a long-time U.S. senator and loyal polemicist for the Democratic Party’s ideology. Barkley, like Biden, came from a humble background, and like Biden, was known for his oratorical prowess. Barkley had represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate for twenty-two years, rising to the position of Senate majority leader. Like Biden, Democrats viewed Barkley favorably. In fact, he delivered the keynote address at the party’s national convention on three separate occasions. In 1952, at age seventy-five, Barkley sought his party’s nomination to succeed President Truman, but was unable to translate his loyal service to the Democratic Party into frontrunner status. Barkley ran a redoubtable campaign, securing endorsements from prominent members of the Democratic establishment, but suffered an immutable blow when prominent labor leaders claimed that he was too old to be president. Barkley was not able to salvage his candidacy and came in fourth place at the Democratic convention.
Biden will likely barnstorm the nation campaigning for Democratic candidates in the 2014 mid-term elections, collecting chits and showing the Democratic Party that he has the vigor and stamina to be their nominee. He will not be alone, as a cavalcade of prospective Democratic presidential candidates will likely join him on the hustings.
SOURCE: TomDispatch (12-11-12)
David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other places. He is currently completing a book about the more than 1,000 U.S. military bases located outside the United States. To read a detailed description of the calculations described in this article and view a chart of the costs of the U.S. military presence abroad, visit www.davidvine.net.
“Are you monitoring the construction?” asked the middle-aged man on a bike accompanied by his dog.
“Ah, sì,” I replied in my barely passable Italian.
“Bene,” he answered. Good.
In front of us, a backhoe’s guttural engine whined into action and empty dump trucks rattled along a dirt track. The shouts of men vied for attention with the metallic whirring of drills and saws ringing in the distance. Nineteen immense cranes spread across the landscape, with the foothills of Italy’s Southern Alps in the background. More than 100 pieces of earthmoving equipment, 250 workers, and grids of scaffolding wrapped around what soon would be 34 new buildings.
We were standing in front of a massive 145-acre construction site for a “little America” rising in Vicenza, an architecturally renowned Italian city and UNESCO world heritage site near Venice. This was Dal Molin, the new military base the U.S. Army has been readying for the relocation of as many as 2,000 soldiers from Germany in 2013.
Since 1955, Vicenza has also been home to another major U.S. base, Camp Ederle. They’re among the more than 1,000 bases the United States uses to ring the globe (with about 4,000 more in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.). This complex of military installations, unprecedented in history, has been a major, if little noticed, aspect of U.S. power since World War II.
During the Cold War, such bases became the foundation for a “forward strategy” meant to surround the Soviet Union and push U.S. military power as close to its borders as possible. These days, despite the absence of a superpower rival, the Pentagon has been intent on dotting the globe with scores of relatively small “lily pad” bases, while continuing to build and maintain some large bases like Dal Molin.
Americans rarely think about these bases, let alone how much of their tax money -- and debt -- is going to build and maintain them. For Dal Molin and related construction nearby, including a brigade headquarters, two sets of barracks, a natural-gas-powered energy plant, a hospital, two schools, a fitness center, dining facilities, and a mini-mall, taxpayers are likely to shell out at least half a billion dollars. (All the while, a majority of locals passionately and vocally oppose the new base.)
How much does the United States spend each year occupying the planet with its bases and troops? How much does it spend on its global presence? Forced by Congress to account for its spending overseas, the Pentagon has put that figure at $22.1 billion a year. It turns out that even a conservative estimate of the true costs of garrisoning the globe comes to an annual total of about $170 billion. In fact, it may be considerably higher. Since the onset of “the Global War on Terror” in 2001, the total cost for our garrisoning policies, for our presence abroad, has probably reached $1.8 trillion to $2.1 trillion.
How Much Do We Spend?
By law, the Pentagon must produce an annual “Overseas Cost Summary” (OCS) putting a price on the military’s activities abroad, from bases to embassies and beyond. This means calculating all the costs of military construction, regular facility repairs, and maintenance, plus the costs of maintaining one million U.S. military and Defense Department personnel and their families abroad -- the pay checks, housing, schools, vehicles, equipment, and the transportation of personnel and materials overseas and back, and far, far more.
The latest OCS, for the 2012 fiscal year ending September 30th, documented $22.1 billion in spending, although, at Congress’s direction, this doesn’t include any of the more than $118 billion spent that year on the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the globe.
While $22.1 billion is a considerable sum, representing about as much as the budgets for the Departments of Justice and Agriculture and about half the State Department’s 2012 budget, it contrasts sharply with economist Anita Dancs’s estimate of $250 billion. She included war spending in her total, but even without it, her figure comes to around $140 billion -- still $120 billion more than the Pentagon suggests.
Wanting to figure out the real costs of garrisoning the planet myself, for more than three years, as part of a global investigation of bases abroad, I’ve talked to budget experts, current and former Pentagon officials, and base budget officers. Many politely suggested that this was a fool’s errand given the number of bases involved, the complexity of distinguishing overseas from domestic spending, the secrecy of Pentagon budgets, and the “frequently fictional” nature of Pentagon figures. (The Department of Defense remains the only federal agency unable to pass a financial audit.)
Ever the fool and armed only with the power of searchable PDFs, I nonetheless plunged into the bizarro world of Pentagon accounting, where ledgers are sometimes still handwritten and $1 billion can be a rounding error. I reviewed thousands of pages of budget documents, government and independent reports, and hundreds of line items for everything from shopping malls to military intelligence to postal subsidies.
Wanting to err on the conservative side, I decided to follow the methodology Congress mandated for the OCS, while also looking for overseas costs the Pentagon or Congress might have ignored. It hardly made sense to exclude, for example, the health-care costs the Department of Defense pays for troops on overseas bases, spending for personnel in Kosovo, or the price tag for supporting the 550 bases we have in Afghanistan.
In the spirit of “monitoring the construction,” let me lead you on an abbreviated account of my quest to come up with the real costs of occupying planet Earth.
Missing Costs
Although the Overseas Cost Summary initially might seem quite thorough, you’ll soon notice that countries well known to host U.S. bases have gone missing-in-action. In fact, at least 18 countries and foreign territories on the Pentagon’s own list of overseas bases go unnamed.
Particularly surprising is the absence of Kosovo and Bosnia. The military has had large bases and hundreds of troops there for more than a decade, with another Pentagon report showing 2012 costs of $313.8 million. According to that report, the OCS also understates costs for bases in Honduras and Guantánamo Bay by about a third or $85 million.
And then other oddities appear: in places like Australia and Qatar, the Pentagon says it has funds to pay troops but no money for “operations and maintenance” to turn the lights on, feed people, or do regular repairs. Adjusting for these costs adds an estimated $36 million. As a start, I found:
$436 million for missing countries and costs.
That’s not much compared to $22 billion and chump change in the context of the whole Pentagon budget, but it’s just a beginning.
At Congress’s direction, the Pentagon also omits the costs of bases in the oft-forgotten U.S. territories -- Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. This is strange because the Pentagon considers them “overseas.” More important, as economist Dancs says, “The United States retains territories... primarily for the purposes of the military and projecting military power.” Plus, they are, well, literally overseas.
Conservatively, this adds $3 billion in total military spending to the OCS.
However, there are more quasi-U.S. territories in the form of truly forgotten Pacific Ocean island nations in “compacts of free association” with the United States -- the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau. Ever since it controlled these islands as “strategic trust territories” after World War II, the U.S. has enjoyed the right to establish military facilities on them, including the nuclear test site on the Bikini Atoll and the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site elsewhere in the Marshalls.
This comes in exchange for yearly aid payments from the Office of Insular Affairs, adding another $571 million and yielding total costs of:
$3.6 billion for territories and Pacific island nations.
Speaking of the oceans, at Congress’s instruction, the Pentagon excludes the cost of maintaining naval vessels overseas. But Navy and Marine Corps vessels are essentially floating (and submersible) bases used to maintain a powerful military presence on (and under) the seas. A very conservative estimate for these costs adds another $3.8 billion.
Then there are the costs of Navy prepositioned ships at anchor around the world. Think of them as warehouse-bases at sea, stocked with weaponry, war materiel, and other supplies. And don’t forget Army prepositioned stocks. Together, they come to an estimated $604 million a year. In addition, the Pentagon appears to omit some $861 million for overseas “sealift” and “airlift” and “other mobilization” expenses. All told, the bill grows by:
$5.3 billion for Navy vessels and personnel plus seaborne and airborne assets.
Also strangely missing from the Cost Summary is that little matter of health-care costs. Overseas costs for the Defense Health Program and other benefits for personnel abroad add an estimated $11.7 billion yearly. And then there’s $538 million in military and family housing construction that the Pentagon also appears to overlook in its tally.
So too, we can’t forget about shopping on base, because we the taxpayers are subsidizing those iconic Walmart-like PX (Post Exchange) shopping malls on bases worldwide. Although the military is fond of saying that the PX system pays for itself because it helps fund on-base recreation programs, Pentagon leaders neglect to mention that the PXs get free buildings and land, free utilities, and free transportation of goods to overseas locations. They also operate tax-free.
While there’s no estimate for the value of the buildings, land, and utilities that taxpayers provide, the exchanges reported $267 million in various subsidies for 2011. (Foregone federal taxes might add $30 million or more to that figure.) Add in as well postal subsidies of at least $71 million and you have:
$12.6 billion for health care, military and family housing, shopping and postal subsidies.
Another Pentagon exclusion is rent paid to other countries for the land we garrison. Although a few countries like Japan, Kuwait, and South Korea actually pay the United States to subsidize our garrisons -- to the tune of $1.1 billion in 2012 -- far more common, according to base expert Kent Calder, “are the cases where the United States pays nations to host bases.”
Given the secretive nature of basing agreements and the complex economic and political trade-offs involved in base negotiations, precise figures are impossible to find. However, Pentagon-funded research indicates that 18% of total foreign military and economic aid goes toward buying base access. That swells our invoice by around $6.3 billion. Payments to NATO of $1.7 billion “for the acquisition and construction of military facilities and installations” and other purposes, brings us to:
$6.9 billion in net “rent” payments and NATO contributions.
Although the OCS must report the costs of all military operations abroad, the Pentagon omits $550 million for counternarcotics operations and $108 million for humanitarian and civic aid. Both have, as a budget document explains about humanitarian aid, helped “maintain a robust overseas presence,” while the military “obtains access to regions important to U.S. interests.” The Pentagon also spent $24 million on environmental projects abroad to monitor and reduce on-base pollution, dispose of hazardous and other waste, and for “initiatives…in support of global basing/operations.” So the bill now grows by:
$682 million for counternarcotics, humanitarian, and environmental programs.
The Pentagon tally of the price of occupying the planet also ignores the costs of secret bases and classified programs overseas. Out of a total Pentagon classified budget of $51 billion for 2012, I conservatively use only the estimated overseas portion of operations and maintenance spending, which adds $2.4 billion. Then there’s the $15.7 billion Military Intelligence Program. Given that U.S. law generally bars the military from engaging in domestic spying, I estimate that half this spending, $7.9 billion, took place overseas.
Next, we have to add in the CIA’s paramilitary budget, funding activities including secret bases in places like Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East, and its drone assassination program, which has grown precipitously since the onset of the war on terror. With thousands dead (including hundreds of civilians), how can we not consider these military costs? In an email, John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told me that “possibly a third” of the CIA’s estimated budget of $10 billion may now go to paramilitary costs, yielding:
$13.6 billion for classified programs, military intelligence, and CIA paramilitary activities.
Last but certainly not least comes the real biggie: the costs of the 550 bases the U.S. built in Afghanistan, as well as the last three months of life for our bases in Iraq, which once numbered 505 before the U.S. pullout from that country (that is, the first three months of fiscal year 2012). While the Pentagon and Congress exclude these costs, that’s like calculating the New York Yankees’ payroll while excluding salaries for each year’s huge free agent signings.
Conservatively following the OCS methodology used for other countries, but including costs for health care, military pay in the base budget, rent, and “other programs,” we add an estimated:
$104.9 billion for bases and military presence in Afghanistan and other war zones.
Having started with the OCS figure of $22.1 billion, the grand total now has reached:
$168 billion ($169,963,153,283 to be exact).
That’s nearly an extra $150 billion. Even if you exclude war costs -- and I think the Yankees show why that’s a bad idea -- the total still reaches $65.1 billion, or nearly three times the Pentagon’s calculation.
But don’t for a second think that that’s the end of our garrisoning costs. In addition to spending likely hidden in the nooks and crannies of its budget, there are other irregularities in the Pentagon’s accounting. Costs for 16 countries hosting U.S. bases but left out of the OCS entirely, including Colombia, El Salvador, and Norway, may total more than $350 million. The costs of the military presence in Colombia alone could reach into the tens of millions in the context of more than $8.5 billion in Plan Colombia funding since 2000. The Pentagon also reports costs of less than $5 million each for Yemen, Israel, Uganda, and the Seychelles Islands, which seems unlikely and could add millions more.
When it comes to the general U.S. presence abroad, other costs are too difficult to estimate reliably, including the price of Pentagon offices in the United States, embassies, and other government agencies that support bases and troops overseas. So, too, U.S. training facilities, depots, hospitals, and even cemeteries allow overseas bases to function. Other spending includes currency-exchange costs, attorneys’ fees and damages won in lawsuits against military personnel abroad, short-term “temporary duty assignments,” U.S.-based troops participating in exercises overseas, and perhaps even some of NASA’s military functions, space-based weapons, a percentage of recruiting costs required to staff bases abroad, interest paid on the debt attributable to the past costs of overseas bases, and Veterans Administration costs and other retirement spending for military personnel who served abroad.
Beyond my conservative estimate, the true bill for garrisoning the planet might be closer to $200 billion a year.
“Spillover Costs”
Those, by the way, are just the costs in the U.S. government’s budget. The total economic costs to the U.S. economy are higher still. Consider where the taxpayer-funded salaries of the troops at those bases go when they eat or drink at a local restaurant or bar, shop for clothing, rent a local home, or pay local sales taxes in Germany, Italy, or Japan. These are what economists call “spillover” or “multiplier effects.” When I visited Okinawa in 2010, for example, Marine Corps representatives bragged about how their presence contributes $1.9 billion annually to the local economy through base contracts, jobs, local purchases, and other spending. Although the figures may be overstated, it’s no wonder members of Congress like Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison have called for a new “Build in America” policy to protect “the fiscal health of our nation.”
And the costs are still broader when one considers the trade-offs, or opportunity costs, involved. Military spending creates fewer jobs per million dollars expended than the same million invested in education, health care, or energy efficiency -- barely half as many as investing in schools. Even worse, while military spending clearly provides direct benefits to the Lockheed Martins and KBRs of the military-industrial complex, these investments don’t, as economist James Heintz says, boost the “long-run productivity of the rest of the private sector” the way infrastructure investments do.
To adapt a famous line from President Dwight Eisenhower: every base that is built signifies in the final sense a theft. Indeed, think about what Dal Molin’s half a billion dollars in infrastructure could have done if put to civilian uses. Again echoing Ike, the cost of one modern base is this: 260,000 low-income children getting health care for one year or 65,000 going to a year of Head Start or 65,000 veterans receiving VA care for a year.
A Different Kind of “Spillover”
Bases also create a different “spillover” in the financial and non-financial costs host countries bear. In 2004, for example, on top of direct “burden sharing” payments, host countries made in-kind contributions of $4.3 billion to support U.S. bases. In addition to agreeing to spend billions of dollars to move thousands of U.S. Marines and their families from Okinawa to Guam, the Japanese government has paid nearly $1 billion to soundproof civilian homes near U.S. air bases on Okinawa and millions in damages for successful noise pollution lawsuits. Similarly, as base expert Mark Gillem reports, between 1992 and 2003, the Korean and U.S. governments paid $27.3 million in damages because of crimes committed by U.S. troops stationed in Korea. In a single three-year period, U.S. personnel “committed 1,246 criminal acts, from misdemeanors to felonies.”
As these crimes indicate, costs for local communities extend far beyond the economic. Okinawans have recently been outraged by what appears to be another in a long series of rapes committed by U.S. troops. Which is just one example of how, from Japan to Italy, there are what Anita Dancs calls the “costs of rising hostility” over bases. Environmental damage pushes the financial and non-financial toll even higher. The creation of a base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean sent all of the local Chagossian people into exile.
So, too, U.S. troops and their families bear some of those nonfinancial costs due to frequent moves and separation during unaccompanied tours abroad, along with attendant high rates of divorce, domestic violence, substance abuse, sexual assault, and suicide.
“No one, no one likes it,” a stubbly-faced old man told me as I was leaving the construction site. He remembered the Americans arriving in 1955 and now lives within sight of the Dal Molin base. “If it were for the good of the people, okay, but it’s not for the good of the people.”
“Who pays? Who pays?” he asked. “Noi,” he said. We do.
Indeed, from that $170 billion to the costs we can’t quantify, we all do.
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SOURCE: New Republic (12-5-12)
Jonathan Cohn is Senior Editor of The New Republic and author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—and the People Who Pay the Price.
SOURCE: Forbes (12-5-12)
Thomas Del Beccaro is the Chairman of the California Republican Party.
SOURCE: National Interest (12-5-12)
Irena L. Sargsyan is a research analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at The Brookings Institution.
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (12-5-12)
Charles R. Morris is author of The Tycoons, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, winner of the Loeb award as the "Best Business Book of 2008." This article is drawn from his recent book The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution.
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (12-5-12)
Tanya Lokshina is senior researcher and deputy Moscow office director at Human Rights Watch.
SOURCE: Financial Times (UK) (12-5-12)
The writer is chairman of GrupoFinancieroBanorte, and formerly governor of Banco de México and Mexican minister of finance.
SOURCE: The Nation (12-1-12)
John Nichols is the author of The “S” Word:A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism (Verso).
...A new Gallup Poll finds that socialism is now viewed positively by 39 percent of Americans, up from 36 percent in 2010. Among self-described liberals, socialism enjoyed a 62 percent positive rating, while 53 percent of Democrats and independent voters who lean Democratic gave socialism a thumb’s up....
Shocking?
Not really.
Socialism has deep America roots—going back to when Tom Paine used his final pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, to outline a social-democratic model for establishing a just and equitable society. Socialist communes and political movements flourished in the United States during the first decades of the republic’s history, and the advocates for those movements found a home in the radical experiment that came to be known as the “Republican” Party....
SOURCE: National Interest (12-4-12)
Gordon N. Bardos is a Balkan politics and security specialist based in New York.
SOURCE: New Republic (12-4-12)
Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
