Posted by zeugma on May 7, 2006, at 6:05:03
In reply to Feeling bad about the human condition? » zeugma, posted by Declan on May 6, 2006, at 21:06:15
> The cost of operations in Iraq is $US97 billion for financial 2006 and totalling $US440 billion all up (US Congressional Research Service).
> What positive things can I say about this? How might things have been done better?>>If the war had not begun at all. The CIA is in 'free fall' and has been shoved aside by Donald Rumsfeld, ironically it has been discredited because of supposed intelligence failures re 9/11 and Iraq, when the fact is that reports written by CIA analysts were not regarded as worth anything anyway (hence low morale, staff shakeups, massive exodus of senior operatives. There is nothing quite as frustrating as writing accurate, or reasonably accurate, reports that are not taken seriously by their intended audience).
Money sunk into Iraq has been pouring water on sand. Things might have been done better by 1) believing Richard Clarke when he said on 9/12/01 that it was al Qaeda and not Saddam Hussein who perpetrated an act of war against the U.S.; 2)by finishing the job in Afghanistan instead of massively diverting resources to Iraq; 3) by not killing the messenger because the message wasn't liked (that is a perennial problem in politics, and on this board. We can see, in the Bush Administration, a striking parallel with the Civility rules. Input from intelligence is compared to what flatters predetermined notions, and judged on that basis rather than intrinsic merit. Nothing quite as frustrating as this.)
> Health care (health insurance), social security (long term funding for) and reducing dependance on foreign oil (instead of tax breaks to oil companies) for starters.>
I am listening to the radio as I write, and health insurance, social security are falling apart completely, I hear. When Americans do spend money on these things, it's throwing water (or oil) on sand again. Americans' health is worse than Europeans' despite America's spending more money on these matters, reason being that people wind up in emergency rooms because health maintainance is not profitable or intriguing to policy makers, aggressive care of an advanced disease is promoted above methods of prevention that are, it seems, hard for segments of the government to understand.
And pre-emptive warfare, as canvassed in Bush's 2006 policy statement. The human condition is what it is, the American condition not what it was. Maybe self-inflicted wounds satisfy some deep human need, I don't know.
-z
>
>
poster:zeugma
thread:640550
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20060417/msgs/640882.html