Last week, Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei at Politico reported that the White House planned on making deficit reduction a centerpiece of the next State of the Union address. Allen and Vandehei called the decision “practical” saying that “Obama has spent more money on new programs in nine months than Bill Clinton did in eight years, pushing the annual deficit to $1.4 trillion. This leaves little room for big spending initiatives.” This fact is taken completely out of the context of the recession. The title of the article refers to the White House's “spending binge.” The deficits, tax cuts, and spending of the previous administration are ignored entirely.

In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges. But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.......And whether or not the American-built health centers and power plants are ever used as intended, the American companies that won the lion’s share of rebuilding contracts from the federal government have been paid.

Many of us have argued against the Iraq War for some time now and more of the cost and scope of the failure in that war is emerging as it begins to come to an end. At a time when America is debating whether to invest in it's own people or not, I think we should remember that a great many of the Senators that will be debating Universal Healthcare if they even vote to do that were all for the extended war in Iraq and the wasted money invested there.

"The international security company formerly called Blackwater Worldwide is facing large government fines for unlicensed arms shipments to Iraq, as a key Congressional committee is asking for a separate investigation into whether the company bribed Iraqi officials. In talks likely to result in millions of dollars in penalties, executives from the company, now known as Xe Services, are negotiating with government regulators over years of violations of export laws. According to government officials and former company employees, many of the violations involve arms shipments to Iraq, to outfit company security guards operating inside the country. In addition, former company officials say that other penalties could result from violations of licensing requirements for the transfer of other forms of military technology and training expertise to foreign countries."

"It is the problem of an imperialist military built solely to serve the profit system. Contractor industrial complex All U.S. aid, both military and what is labeled “civilian,” is funneled through thousands and thousands of contractors, subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. None of these U.S. corporate middlemen are even slightly interested in the development of Afghanistan or Iraq. Their only immediate aim is to turn a hefty superprofit as quickly as possible, with as much skim and double billing as possible. For a fee they will provide everything from hired guns, such as Blackwater mercenaries, to food service workers, mechanics, maintenance workers and long-distance truck drivers."

[FWIW, this is an extended comment I made to Selise in my last FDL diary.] Selise, why am I the only person in America wearing a black arm band? A woman, an acquaintance, yesterday asked me if I had a death in my family. I said the arm band was for my country. I put it on back in mid-May for the illegal torture travesty, vowing as soon as the Obama administration cleaned up that travesty I would take it off. I told her I also keep it on now for the travesties of the wars. So many deaths of Americans and Middle Eastern peoples for power and money. Not for helping humanity. I told her I am also now wearing it for the 45,000 premature American deaths each year for lack of health care.

Remember Japanese internment Camps? For a while after World War 2 we entertained ourselves into believing that that unfortunate chapter in our history was one more misguided mistake from the past that we would never again commit. Of course, that was before George Bush junior got installed into the presidency and the US saw a resurgence of medieval methods like torture--physical and psychological--and a slew of other uncivil policies assuring the erosion of our liberties.

Remember Japanese internment Camps? For a while after World War 2 we entertained ourselves into believing that that unfortunate chapter in our history was one more misguided mistake from the past that we would never again commit. Of course, that was before George Bush junior got installed into the presidency and the US saw a resurgence of medieval methods like torture--physical and psychological--and a slew of other uncivil policies assuring the erosion of our liberties.

In his essay on Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", W.H. Auden observed that theatrical directors throughout the 30's found it quite natural to make of Caesar a great fascist dictator --more like Mussolini than Hitler. The conspirators, he says, were "liberals". Up to date analogies are irresistible.

Peter Galbraith, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was a very influential “liberal hawk” in promoting the War in Iraq. This brought him much acclaim among the neocons as well as the media, and thus a power player within the Democratic party, as well. The analyses of Peter Galbraith have been frequently quoted by the Washington Post. Mr. Galbraith has written a series of op-ed pieces for the NYT. He has been a frequent guest on NPR, CNN and Fox. He was Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Croatia. He was 2002 adviser to Paul Wolfowitz on Kurdistan. He has influenced the Middle Eastern policy perspectives of Vice President Joseph Biden and Sen. John Kerry. He was mentored by foreign policy power player Richard Holbrook, who during the first stage of the Obama administration successfully pushed the U.N. to assign Galbraith to be second in command of its mission in Afghanistan (he has since been fired because of his strong stance against Karzai election fraud). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/world/middleeast/12galbraith.html?_r=1&hp "The New York Times revealed this week (from a prior investigation by two Norwegian journalists) that Peter Galbraith has had a major conflict of interest regarding his numerous active roles with the U.S. government and with Iraq since 2004 because of a business investment his own well-concealed corporation made in a Kurdish oil field...

"Claims that British soldiers recreated the torture conditions of Abu Ghraib to commit the sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi civilians are being investigated by the Ministry of Defence. "

A group of Iraqi and British officials, including the former Iraqi minister for women's affairs, Dr Nawal Majeed a-Sammarai, and the British doctors David Halpin and Chris Burns-Cox, have petitioned the UN general assembly to ask that an independent committee fully investigate the defects and help clean up toxic materials left over decades of war – including the six years since Saddam Hussein was ousted. "We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies," said Falluja general hospital's director and senior specialist, Dr Ayman Qais. "Before 2003 [the start of the war] I was seeing sporadic numbers of deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities has increased dramatically."

Kellogg Brown and Root and its former parent company Halliburton, which at one time was led by former vice president Dick Cheney, had a government contract to destroy waste at US bases and camps in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An explosive report in the New York Times today could change that. The paper alleges that in the aftermath of the infamous 2007 Nisour Square massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians, top Blackwater officials "authorised secret payments" of about $1m into Iraq intending to bribe officials to allow Blackwater to remain in Iraq despite Baghdad's position that the company would be banned and the killers prosecuted. Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq for two years after the Iraqis announced the company would be kicked out – a fact that has baffled and angered Iraqis. In fact, Blackwater remains in Iraq to this day on a $200m contract that was recently extended by the Obama administration. The new report, if true, could help explain why Blackwater has survived so long in Iraq. It could also be a window into what may become the most serious legal issue facing Prince and other executives. Claims that Prince was aware of the bribery scheme – and that his deputy, the company president Gary Jackson, directed the transfer of the money to Blackwater's hub in Jordan, from where it was funnelled to a top Blackwater manager in Iraq – are reported in the New York Times. Such actions would be illegal under US law.

In Iraq, here we are almost seven years after the invasion -- hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and more than 4,000 American lives later -- and the primary remaining "justification" is that we're bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. Yet the government we helped install and which we empower is becoming increasingly tyrannical, oppressive and brutal. We at least ought to take that strongly into account as we hear government claims that we need to remain, and escalate, in Afghanistan for the good of the people there.

"Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials. ... American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Four former executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then Blackwater’s president, had approved the bribes and that the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where the company maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. The executives, though, said they did not know whether the cash was delivered to Iraqi officials or the identities of the potential recipients. Blackwater’s strategy of buying off the government officials, which would have been illegal under American law, created a deep rift inside the company, according to the former executives."

In the aftermath of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad by operatives working for Blackwater, top company officials including then-president Gary Jackson "authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support," according to the New York Times. Seventeen Iraqis were killed and more than 20 others wounded in the shooting, prompting the Iraqi government to announce it would ban the company from Iraq with officials vowing to prosecute the shooters. Blackwater, however, remains in Iraq to this day. While the Times reports that it is unclear if the bribes were paid and if so to whom, this much is clear: Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq for a full two years after the Iraqis announced the company would be banned--a fact that has baffled and angered Iraqis. While the company eventually lost its large State Department security contract to a competitor in May 2009, Blackwater remains in Iraq on a $200 million aviation contract, which authorizes its men to be armed. That contract was recently extended by the Obama administration.

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials. Four former executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then Blackwater’s president, had approved the bribes and that the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where the company maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq.

So here we are fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fighting for freedom? Really? We're there because the folks that represent us want these two wars. It's that simple. Never mind Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and Bin Laden got away when we had a real chance to get him. Never mind that 93,911 - 102,465 Iraqi civilians have died due to our presence there. Never mind that we've spent $700 billion in Iraq and $231 billion in Afghanistan. Never mind that our Predator drones are killing innocent people.

Fort Hood is still reeling from last week’s carnage, in which an Army psychiatrist is accused of a massacre that left 13 people dead. But in the town of Killeen and other surrounding communities, the attack, one of the worst mass shootings on a military base in the United States, is also seen by many as another blow in an area that has been beset by crime and violence since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Reports of domestic abuse have grown by 75 percent since 2001. At the same time, violent crime in Killeen has risen 22 percent while declining 7 percent in towns of similar size in other parts of the country. The stresses are seen in other ways, too. Since 2003, there have been 76 suicides by personnel assigned to Fort Hood, with 10 this year, according to military officials.