Warner Less than Courageous

The George C. Marshall Foundation honored Sen. John Warner at this 2007 celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. Winston Churchill praised General Marshall as the "organizer of victory." Looking at the war in Iraq, has Sen. Warner been an organizer, and has the US been victorious? No. Warner, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee, has presided over the destruction of the US military. Too few men and women were assigned too large a task in bringing a new government to Iraq. The military has been over-stretched and under-supplied, often lacking flack jackets and armored vehicles, even for the too few troops who were set there.

Now Warner has called for pulling out 5,000 troops of the 160,000 currently there, if the President wants to. It's almost nothing. It's too few to be noticeable, and probably too few to make a difference one way or another. It's symbolic, and that's something, but it's not much. What George Marshall did was more than symbolic. He took a small, peacetime military, much like America's today, and transformed it into a huge fighting machine that made the difference in World War II. He made hard choices; he replaced peacetime generals with generals who could fight. He drafted millions of men; he turned America's industrial base on its heels toward the production of military equipment. Bush and Warner kept their yes-man generals and gave huge tax breaks to the rich. They said, "Keep us in power and we'll give you lots of money and send some worthless farm boys and ghetto kids to die in Iraq. And we'll do it with generals who won't rock the boat." Their contempt for average Americans is boundless.

Warner may not be the worst politician in the Senate, but he certainly does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with General George Marshall.

Bush Criticizes Cowards on Vietnam, Injures Foot

By comparing Iraq to Vietnam, Bush shot himself in the foot, as chronicled by many commentators, including this WP op-ed. Bush would have had other, poorer, less educated, less beautiful people fight on for years in Vietnam, while he partied during his ignored National Guard service. At least we tried, putting at least 500,000 troops in Vietnam for a while. Why doesn't Bush try that in Iraq? He's afraid to. But he'll probably do his best to see that the career military gets blamed for losing another war that he tried valiently to win. He'll blame the military for not fighting hard enough and not supporting him enough.

Tax Cuts and Moral Hazards

The main recipients of Bush's tax cuts are the same people responsible for the turmoil in the financial markets. The rich are so greedy that they first made bad mortgage loans to people who couldn't afford them. But the bad mortgages created "paper" that they could then sell to more unsuspecting buyers. Thus they could get the bad mortgages off their books and pass them off to someone else. It was a game of musical chairs until the music finally stopped and someone ended up holding some bad paper. Some people are going to get stuck with some losses, but others have made out like bandits and will have huge profits with which to take advantage of Bush's tax cuts, which particularly benefit those in hedge funds and private equity, some of the main villains in the bad-paper game.

In discussing what to do about this situation, the concept of "moral hazard" gets mentioned occasionally, as it does in this Financial Times editorial. The moral hazard concept is that you should not bail out people who got themselves in financial difficulty. It certainly applies to the hedge fund and private equity types; it is less clear that it applies to the average homeowner who might lose his house because he got a disadvantageous mortgage. There should be a level playing field. The hedge fund types certainly knew what they were doing; most have MBAs. Homeowners may or may not have known; they may have been cheated by mortgage brokers who didn't explain exactly what they were getting into. But the homeowners should have been smart enough to understand that if it sounds too good to be true, it's probably not true.

In any case, the moral hazard argument is that we should not bail out those who profited from taking risks that have now come home to roost. Therefore, in general, the Fed should not bail them out by cutting interest rates. But the economy does have a problem if the market turmoil threatens to bring on recession. It's the old story, "If you own the bank $100,000 and can't pay, you're in trouble. If you owe the bank $100,000,000 and can't pay, the bank is in trouble." So, it's possible the hedge fund types have the Fed over a barrel. But certainly the Fed should resist the temptation to bail out the market losers, like Jim Cramer of CNBC, according to Barrons. Bush has already given them a ton of help by cutting their taxes to almost nothing. Bush works for them; maybe Bernanke doesn't. Maybe he works for America. We'll see.

Little Genuine Support for the Troops in Iraq

The Army doesn't see much genuine support from the American public for the troops in Iraq. A NYT story on American troops in Germany being reassigned to Iraq says their commanding general told the families not to go back home to the States, because they wouldn't find much support there. They would find more support at their Army base in Germany. The article said:

One thing General Hertling pointedly did not suggest was for the families of the soldiers to return to the United States. The Army’s goal is to create a support network strong enough that the spouses will decide to wait out the deployment on the base in Germany, a country that many of them scarcely know and that pointedly declined to take part in the Iraq war. “We tell them, ‘You will not get the support you think you will, if you go back home,’ ” he said in an interview.

But it also demonstrates, General Hertling said, how the gap between American society and its volunteer military has widened as the Iraq war has dragged on. “Many people there have just moved on,” he said.

The extension of the last deployment — which came at the last minute after some troops had already reunited with their families in Germany — strained relations between the families and the Army. “There have been so many changes in what we’ve asked soldiers to do, that we may have put spouses in a position where they question what comes next,” said General Hertling, who has had two sons and a daughter-in-law serving in Iraq.

For most Americans, supporting the troops means putting a bumper sticker on their car, or watching a program about the Army on TV. The real way to support the troops is to enlist in the Army or the Marines to go fight. Because nobody does that, those in the service go back to Iraq again and again. Bush and Cheney don't care. They were both draft dodgers during Vietnam who have contempt for the military; to them, serving in the military is something that poor, stupid people do who can't get a real job working for Halliburton or the Texas Rangers.

To me an example of contempt for the military is that the last two Democratic candidates for President, Al Gore and John Kerry, were both Vietnam veterans. The public said, "Naw, we don't like veterans. We didn't serve, and we don't trust those do-gooders who did serve. Give us a draft dodger." And the public got what it deserved: cowards who were afraid to fight in Iraq, who got us into a horrible war that will destabilize the Middle East because they were afraid to fight hard enough to win. Why? Because they would have to raise taxes and re-institute the draft to get enough soldiers to fight and win the war they started. Cowards! Republicans, draft dodger Rudy Giuliani included, are cowards, except for John McCain, Chuck Hagel, and a few other veterans.

I'm not happy with Sen. John Warner, who was Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee during the invasion of Iraq and during the first years of the war, although he is a veteran. He did not support the military, and has let Bush and Cheney virtually destroy the military by not providing the necessary manpower and equipment to fight the war in Iraq. Warner just got an award from the George Marshall Foundation, but instead of an award he should have gotten a censure for doing the exact opposite of what Marshall did to build up the Army to win World War II. It's time for Warner to go. He has failed his country.