Bush is not leading us well. We should have heard some thoughts about how hard war can be. It's like the disclaimers we get on cigarettes. Warning, these things can kill you.
8:37:58 PM    

Sending 'Liberal Media' Truism to the Fact-Checker. In an impressively researched book, Eric Alterman provocatively challenges the conservative belief in a liberal media bias. By Orville Schell. [New York Times: Books]
8:26:45 PM    

What military action doesn't include loss of life? Are Americans that out of touch? We've already had loss of life in the preparation for war.
8:19:47 PM    

New York Times Op-Ed:

March 20, 2003

Heads in the Sand

The biggest wartime secret fiercely kept by the White House seems to be the estimated dollar cost to the nation's taxpayers of invading, pacifying and rebuilding Iraq, from first shot to last. Congress is now flailing through a budget debate without this vital chunk of information on the public books. Instead, Republican leaders are laboring to lock in the second stage of President Bush's deficit-stoking tax cuts before presenting lawmakers with the full sticker shock of his war and its effect on the rising tide of red ink. Wartime patriotism, not rational disclosure, is being invoked as a motive for blindly approving a budget plan that even without the war costs factored in, will slash critical domestic programs, allow upper-bracket Americans another big tax break and greatly compound Bush deficits that already stretch across the next decade.

Senate Democrats have failed in their worthy attempt to hold off approval of new tax cuts until the war's costs are clear. Off-the-wall estimates of $100 billion or more for the combat alone are floating around, but the administration remains about as transparent as a Stealth bomber in specifying the likely price. The president obviously fears that this information might feed the public debate about the wisdom of the war ? or at least the wisdom of his tax cuts.

A few Republicans in both houses are restive about joining the evolving spectacle of cutting government revenues and services ? even war veterans' programs ? while deepening the deficit and taking a budgetary flier on Iraq. But in the face of Republican leaders' intransigence, the main hope for even denting the tax cut scheme seems an alternative Senate proposal that would cut the president's $725 billion plan down to $350 billion. This would presumably kill his $396 billion proposal to end the dividend tax. Opponents of all new tax cuts are balking at allowing Mr. Bush this half-a-loaf victory. But it may be the only available brake as the president and House leaders work to wrap a woeful budget outlook firmly in the flag.
8:15:36 PM    

March 20, 2003

The Era of Preventive War

The war that is about to begin charts a new course for this nation. It is the first application of the Bush administration's ambitious new doctrine of preventive war. Everyone hopes that the Iraq war will be successful. But the new era it opens may not be.

The administration believes that the United States must be prepared to attack nations that pose a potential future danger, rather than waiting for them to strike and do incalculable damage first. No one can deny that in a world of international terror groups and sophisticated weapons, new strategies of national defense must be found. The risk of the Bush doctrine, however, is that it offers an administration carte blanche to use military might against hypothetical threats before all other avenues are exhausted.

Every unfriendly or unsavory government trying to develop unconventional weapons that could conceivably fall into terrorist hands is now, in effect, a declared enemy of the United States and a potential target of an eventual American attack. Iraq, which has used chemical weapons, twice committed aggression against its neighbors and repeatedly violated United Nations disarmament requirements, was an obvious first test, even though the administration never established that Iraq posed an imminent threat to this country.

Mr. Bush has already named Iran and North Korea as Baghdad's partners in an "axis of evil." Both have nuclear weapons programs far in advance of Saddam Hussein's and histories of international terrorism. In all, Washington lists 13 countries with active biological weapons programs, including Cuba, Libya and Syria, and 16 currently producing chemical weapons, including Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia and Sudan. All six have the same kind of indirect links with international terrorism that Iraq does. Following the doctrine to its logical conclusion would create a world in which the United States attempted to protect its security through military dominance, stretching ever further until the nation's resources and the world's patience were exhausted.

Meanwhile, the United States has not done nearly all it could to take peaceful steps to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Right now, the easiest place for terrorists to get their hands on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons ingredients is probably the former Soviet Union, where the world's largest known supplies of all three lie around, in some cases uninventoried and unguarded, and there are hundreds of unemployed or underpaid weapons scientists. The budget for threat reduction programs there could be tripled for less than a tenth of the cost of transporting American troops to and from Iraq.

To improve the chances of peaceful containment, Washington also needs to reinforce global police and financial cooperation against terrorist networks and strengthen arms control agreements and inspections. Trade in nuclear materials and other weapons ingredients should be much more strictly monitored.

In the uncertain world of the 21st century, the United States may be confronted with the need to fight a preventive war in the future. But we should regard it as a terrible last resort, to be avoided at all possible costs, as we do the use of nuclear weapons. It should never be the center of our defense policy.
8:09:37 PM