Powell Says Troops Are Adequately Compensated

As if to reply to my post on November 9, Secretary of State Powell said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo for the Wall Street Journal on November 13 that he thought US troops were adequately compensated. The interview said:

• MS. BARTIROMO: Certainly the group of people who have really been paying the price for this war have been our soldiers on the front lines. We had Ben Stein, who is a supporter of yours, supporter of the Administration and a supporter of the war, on the program recently, and he was upset about what we -- at the way we compensate our soldiers.
  Do you think that we pay them appropriately?
• SECRETARY POWELL: Can you ever pay a soldier enough for putting his or her life at risk and perhaps losing his or her life? Can you ever compensate a family adequately for that kind of sacrifice? Not really. But we do a pretty good job. We have benefits available for our soldiers in case they are injured or lost in battle, and with respect to their salaries, it's a volunteer force so what we have to do is go out into the marketplace and recruit people and we have to pay them a salary that will cause them to volunteer to come into the Army. We're in a market system with respect to our military, and so the entry level salaries are competitive with what they might get in a similar capacity -- not quite identical but similar capacity -- in civilian life.
• And the fact of the matter is we're meeting our recruiting goals and we meet our reenlistment goals, so we are paying a wage that allows us to do that. Is it adequate? Would I like to see soldiers get paid more? All the time.

Osama bin Laden and Baptists Agree On Morals

Until I read comments by Oklahoma candidate for the US Senate Brad Carson in the New Republic, it didn't strike home to me how similar the moral attitudes of conservative Christians are to Osama bin Laden's. The article was recommended in the MyDD blog.

Carson says that after he addressed the congregation, "the pastor launched into an attack on the 'pro-choice terrorists,' who were, to his mind, far more dangerous than Al Qaida." While it has become something of a Democratic theme, it does somewhat appear that the conservatives espouse a viewpoint more like the pre-Enlightenment Middle Ages than current Western thinking. Carson says, "The culture war is real, and it is a conflict not merely about some particular policy or legislative item, but about modernity itself." Both the Baptists and bin Laden seem opposed to modernity.... The voters aren't deluded or uneducated. They simply reject the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones."

Ironically, Bush's "moral values" base shares bin Laden's view that economics are unimportant, that moral values must be restored at any cost. Even more ironically, Bush takes advantage of this viewpoint by pandering to the other part of his base, the majority of the wealthy in this country by giving them tons of Federal Government largesse in the form of tax breaks, government subsidies, and government contracts.

What Do We Get From Falluja Attack?

The L.A. Times today says that it is "unlikely that the United States can establish the stability needed for credible elections in January even if its forces succeed in Falluja." The good news is that no one who has watched the battle on TV can question the Marines' and the Army's courage, which was in question after they quit the attack on Falluja in April. The bad news is that it looks like it could be a Pyrrhic victory, because it will not help Iraq hold elections in January. There is a lot of talk about Falluja being a "ghost town." If the missing residents don't return, how can they vote? And if they don't vote, what's the point of this exercise? And if the rebellion just moves from Falluja to other towns, as it seemed to move to Mosul yesterday, what's the point of that?

It looks as if it all boils down to the US not being willing to commit enough troops to Iraq to make the invasion really successful. The New York Times reports that the military had to pull about one-third of its forces out of Falluja to respond to the violence in Mosul. We defeated Saddam Hussein, but we have not turned Iraq into a functioning democratic state, because so far we have not been willing to commit the forces necessary to do so.

Bin Laden Attacked US Because of US Support for Israel

I haven't heard any "experts" discuss Osama bin Laden's statement in his latest video (October 2004) that "after the injustice was so much and we saw transgressions and the coalition between Americans and the Israelis against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it occurred to my mind that we deal with the [World Trade] towers." (Translation by CNN.) According to bin Laden, it was America's unwavering support for Israel's often cruel treatment of the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular, including a specific Israeli attack on buildings in Lebanon, that led to the attack on the twin towers in New York. Certainly bin Laden is playing a political game, but his statement must have some value in judging his motives.

Yet, Bush blames the 9/11 attack on Iraq, rather than viewing it as a response to his policies toward Israel. This doesn't mean that the US policy toward the Israel-Palestine conflict is wrong, but it does mean that there are costs to that policy, possibly starting with 3,000 American lives. A cynical person might say that's why the settlements for the victims' families were so generous, as I noted they were in a previous post. Generous settlements helped assure that there would be less pressure from the victims' families to look at foreign policy. However, their pressure did bring about the 9/11 Commission report, including strong criticism of US security and intelligence capabilities. Bin Laden made his statement only after the 9/11 report had been issued.

Now that Arafat is gone, it will be interesting to see what happens to Bush's Mid-East foreign policy.