Military spending.

It is impossible that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was the cause of America’s war on Iraq. The reasons are numerous, but here are a few:

(1) We did not free the Kuwaitis. We restored the Emir of Kuwait to power.

(2) Iraq obtained permission from the U.S. for the invasion. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq informed Saddam eight days before the invasion that “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts,” the transcript reports Glaspie saying, “such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction … that Kuwait is not associated with America.”
cite

(3) Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was a virtual duplication of what the U.S. had done in Panama a few months earlier.

Actually, that last bit probably isn’t fair. That is, it isn’t fair to Saddam. Iraq killed about 240 Kuwaitis in their invasion, whereas the U.S. killed about 2,000 civilians in Panama, about 10 times more than were killed in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

The corporate hierarchy does even better. Doesn’t it give you a warm feeling in your heart to know that you are paying for the heads of Boeing, Raytheon, Northrup, etc. to live luxurious lifestyles?

I see nothing wrong with Keynesian spending in principle. In this case, though, we would be better served employing everybody in the “defense” industry doing something useful. Indeed, it would be better just to pay everybody their wages to NOT work building weapons.

Your pathetic jab aside, Sua is right.

It seems to have mattered to the Kuwaitis. The Emir was their accepted political leader, whether we liked it or no.

Iraq did not obtain permission. They quizzed the ambassador on whether or not he though America would care. There was no official policy on the subject, and American leaders had not perticularly given any thought on the subject. There is no proof that Iraq wuld not have proceeded exactly a they did, particularly given their later intranigience.

And yes, the US did not really care about some minor territiorial or oil-rights dispute between Middle Eastern countries. But we did care about a major one.

Irrelevant. At the time, their was intense belief in mass casualties: indee, their were fears of a second, political holocaust. And I challenge you numbers, since you provide no cite and I have located no alternate source of information on the web (in my admittedly short search).

Also, I would like to quiz you on whether or not you have been to that Panamanian military dictatorship down there, yeah, you know, the one where we conquered that country and killed some people and took their Oil?

WHy should it bother me? They are doing a valuable service by organizing and tasking out jobs to the correct people. They organize,m produce, and develop new technologies. They mostly worked hard to get there and work hard now.

Offset: I think this is Chump’s real problem. Money. He thinks that anyone not producing osme physical object or immediate service is useless.

Commie Tool.

Well guess what: American Does need those weapons. Because right now, we are the only thing in the world between any petty dictator and regional domination. Think of that in your little mental socialist paradise.

Cite, please.

Cite, please. Your list of reasons does not establish this.

I would like a cite proving that the US and UK control the UN agency administering the oil-for-food program. The fact that it occurs in New York does not establish this.

Cite, please.

Cite, please.

I feel much the same for those who sneer at the military who defends their rights. Only without the pity.

Regards,
Shodan

Um, nothing. I graduated a few years back. Why?
Or did you make this response because you were unable to rebut my point?

Inquiring minds want to know…

Sua

Unbelievable. Chumpsky, when you find something you like, do you then stop reading your own cites?

As your own cite notes, the Iraqis produced a transcript of the Hussein-Glaspie meeting. Your quote comes from that transcript.

Glaspie claims the transcript is a fabrication.

So far, we have a “he-said, she-said” situation. I understand your desire to side with the holy Iraqis against the evil Americans, and therefore your decision to give more credibility to the Iraqis version of events.
Unfortunately, however, there is more evidence provided in your own cite.

So, the deputy prime minister of Iraq (he resigned in August 2001) affirmatively states that the United States and Glaspie did not give Iraq permission to invade Kuwait.
This extrinsic evidence breaks the “he-said, she-said” logjam. A party whose best interests would dictate that he support the transcript, if it were true, sides with Ms. Glaspie.

IOW, Chumpsky, even the Iraqis don’t agree with you. You had to know this; you provided the cite. Yet you try to deceive the members of this Board.
Why?

Sua

Well maybe Sadaam should have thought about that before he invaded Kuwait. Leaving a country to develop on its own is not the same as allowing ot to run amok throughout the region. Let me join you in the Chumpsky Alternate History for a moment. Should the United States not have gotten involved in Persian Gulf war and allowed Iraq to hold onto Kuwait (and possible Saudi Arabia and whereever else Sadaam felt like invading)? The policy was tries in the 40s with Nazi Germany and it didn’t work so well.

It’s easy to point fingers and present knee-jerk responses.
Your problem is that you have not addressed any of these real issues with any kind of solution. The fact is that there are petty dictators, terrorist organizations and rival nations who would like to do harm to the US and our allies. You can’t simply wish it away. Saying that the military is responsible for creating these enemies is like saying that criminals are caused by police (which you probably will say).

What, msmith537, didn’t you know the Police are just a tool of the Capitalist oppressors? :wink:

He did think about it. He thought about it very hard. First, numerous attempts were made to negotiate a settlement to the crisis, which was escalated at each point by Kuwait (probably with U.S. goading.)

And, of course, as I pointed out, Iraq was very careful to get permission from the U.S. for the invasion.

And of course, as I pointed out, your own citation for that position contradicts your assertion. IOW, you are lying.

Why?

Sua

I’m sorry, did you say something? It is really difficult to understand you with all that foam coming out of your mouth.

Marc

Harder than the 13 year-old girls working 12 hour days in a Nicaraguan Maquiladora making $0.19 an hour?

It’s funny how the same themes repeat themselves throughout history. You are repeating a very old idea that has been used to justify every sort of conquest and rape.

It used to be called the “White Man’s burden” in the days when Europeans and their offshoots were conquering the world. You see, it was the duty of the White Man to bring light and civilization to those dark savages around the world. And the conquest, massacre and robbery that occured, well, that was just an abberation of a well-meaning idealism. Before that, you know, the Ottomans were the only thing standing in the way of total chaos, and before them it was the Holy Roman Empire, beset on all sides by savages ready to destroy the civilized world, and so on, ad nauseum.

I hate to break it to you, but the world would be just fine, in fact a whole lot better off, if the U.S. did not take it upon itself to “defend values of mothers loving their children” in the words of George Bush.

U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD!

And the hierarchy at welfare offices, restaurants, and every other business and governmental office also do better than the shmoes on the front line. So fucking what?
Again, you seem incapable of understanding that not all of us think defense spending is useless. Some of us think a strong defense is the first priority of the goverment.
Yeah, maybe we could bring all our troops home and pay people not to make weapons. What are you going several decades down the pike when the Chinese, the Russians, the European Union, al-Queda’s Jihad for a Better world, or somebody else decides to invade us or restrict overseas trade? Organize a sit-in?

Chumpsky -

SuaSponte makes a good point, namely that you are full of shit.

Did you have any response? Or can we simply assume that not so much debating as listening to yourself rant?

Regards,
Shodan

If I may offer a reasoned, if Chumpskyan (?) point of view on the subject:

There’s plenty of reason to want to lower defense spending. The reasons are as follows:

1 - The tax cut. Assuming conservatives like their tax cuts, and we know you do, those cuts have to be paid for somehow. Sua, your point on discretionary spending is technically correct but in the real world holds no water. Social Security, Medicare, interstate highways, and airports are financed through trust funds which have taxes dedicated to their financing. Defense and the other programs lumped in under discretionary spending are financed through non-dedicated taxes, mostly personal and corporate income taxes, along with excise taxes, customs duties, and maybe some other taxes I don’t know about. So if you want to cut the income tax, then you also have to look to cut that which the tax finances if you don’t want to find yourself in a hole.
2 - Defense is the largest piece of spending financed through the above non-dedicated taxes.
Data is at: http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/01statab/stat-ab01.html, section 9, Federal Government Finances and Employment.
The calculation gets a bit hairy because of the unified budget that gets presented. This is, btw, strictly a political device thought up because since the Social Security trust fund has a large surplus, that surplus can cover up the deficit being run elsewhere. When the trust fund was in deficit, it was separated from the budget so that its deficit wouldn’t make the budget look worse.
That said, here’s how it looks for that piece paid for outside of trust fund sources:



National defense: 299.1
Income security: 262.6
Net interest: 206.4 (net of the amount paid for by the aforementioned trust funds)


…and on it goes. The above are the big three though.
It should be noted that the defense figure doesn’t include the amount spent on veterans’ benefits, which one could argue really belongs in the same line item if we’re debating the total defense bill. That amounts to 45.4 billion. Taken together, these amount to 344.5 billion.
As for the receipts which pay for this, they are, in order of size:



Individual Income Taxes: 1072.9
Corporation Income Taxes: 213.1
Excise Taxes:              71.1


Clearly, defense is easily affordable given the 2001 level of taxes. Without the veterans department, it amounts to 22% of spending from these sources, with the veterans department it amounts to 25%. But as we have an ongoing tax cut regime, with more tax cuts being demanded almost hourly, it seems, it may not be in the future. Besides the already passed tax cut, we have a call for speeding up its benefits, a call for ending the double taxation of dividends (which BTW, I’m for, for reasons way too complex to get into here), calls to end the corporate income tax altogether, and Democrats calling for a payroll tax holiday, a thing which doesn’t directly affect the above of course, but it just goes to show how the air is full of enthusiastic calls for cutting taxes.
Does something have to give? In my opinion, yes, because the deficit is already out of control. Look at http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm, a site which gives the debt, as they say, down to the penny. Look at the net increase in this debt from 2001 to 2002: 421 billion dollars, rounded to the nearest billion, by my calculation. This is the true deficit. That increase amounts to 4% of GDP. Can we keep growing the debt by 4% of GDP every single year? I don’t think so.
3 - The economic argument. Yes defense spending stimulates the economy in the areas where the money is spent. No, the net effect is not positive. No way.
Any transfer of money, whether it be for Social Security or for defense, to name the two biggest, from economically active and innovative areas to economically inert areas is always, always bad. Given that there is no such thing as a base or a fort that exports a product that others are willing to pay for, they are by definition economically inert. Ditto for defense procurement, which simply buys things which have no useful economic function once they’ve been bought. If the NYC Transit Authority buys a subway train, that train is put into service and for years will take large numbers of people to and from work. If the Defense Department buys a jet, that jet does no work which has a direct economic benefit. That doesn’t mean we don’t need the jet; it simply means that we have to consider carefully the outlays for items like this, because the net economic effect is not nearly as beneficial as it would be for the train. In the aggregate, of course. Any one individual jet can save quite a lot if it prevents an attack on our soil, which leads us to number
4 - This one’s for Chumpsky: when considering how much to spend for defense, you also have to take into account what is saved. Our overwhelming military advantage means that no sane nation would ever think of attacking us, or any nation to which we are allied, for that matter. Only the occasional clever terrorist can get through. That’s a lot of office buildings, factories, warehouses, and homes that are still standing because no attack of any real size has ever been launched by another nation against us. Yes, we had the WTC and Oklahoma City. But so far, those have been isolated instances. Which brings us to
5 - The armed forces are useless for preventing terrorist attacks. At the very least, we should cut out some of the money currently going to the DoD and redirect it to intelligence. And get some more intelligence into our use of intelligence. Increasing the defense budget, which I believe our president is proposing, is as crystal clear a case of fighting the last war as ever there was.

Pantom,

  1. If you may recall from the debates over the “Social Security lockbox” of the late 90s, the trust funds are not inviolate. As we speak, Social Security tax receipts are being spent as part of the general budget.
    You state

In actuality, the Social Security Trust Fund is the strictly political device. It does not exist - all that is “in” it are Treasury Bonds; IOW governmental IOUs.

  1. Nor are the trust funds the sole source of funding. The highway trust fund, for example, rarely, if ever, is sufficient to pay for major road construction projects.

  2. By no means is all non-discretionary spending paid for by a trust fund. For example, welfare (post-reform), is paid to the states in a block grant based upon their poverty levels at a set point in time. It is therefore non-discretionary spending, yet it is paid for by the federal budget.

  3. Finally, the whole trust fund system means nothing. Tomorrow, Congress could wipe out every single trust fund, have all the taxes currently dedicated to those trust funds paid into the general budget, and nothing would change. Those trust funds were set up at the “discretion” of Congress, and Congress, in its discretion, can shut them all down tomorrow.

Let’s put it this way. Pretend that tomorrow, Congress eliminates the Social Security tax, and raises income taxes by the same percentage rate - so that everyone keeps paying the same taxes. It still keeps paying Social Security payments out at the same rate.
Has the percentage of the government budget spent on the military suddenly dropped dramatically? Are we now a less warlike country?

Or does it make more sense to deal with governmental spending as a whole, and to refrain from artificially eliminating portions of the budget from consideration when trying to make a political point?

Sua

Hi Sua

Since you are making this rather serious charge that I am lying, we will assume that you have some pretty strong evidence to back up your claim. Let us see how it holds up.

You dispute that Glaspie gave the implicit go-ahead for the invasion, citing, correctly, that Glaspie disputed that she made the statement attributed to her. However, you neglected to put this into a context. You also assume that Glaspie was telling the truth, a rather spurious assumption, given the history of U.S. leaders.

Here is the full transcript of the interview of Glaspie with Saddam: source

Note, in particular the dates, and the note, “The State Department has declined to comment on its accuracy.” The interview took place on July 25, 1990, 8 days before the invasion. Glaspie denied the statement on April 11, 1991 when the U.S. war was almost over! Furthermore, shortly after the Iraqi invasion, she stated, “Obviously, I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.” cite

One must actually look at the history of the conflict to understand what was going on here. Iraq was an ally of the U.S. It’s economy was badly in need of stimulus, which it was attempting to obtain through oil sales. At this very crucial moment, Kuwait began undercutting world oil prices by exceeding its OPEC quota. Furthermore, Kuwait was slant-drilling on the border, literally stealing oil out from under the feet of Iraq. The response was hardly unpredictable. Iraq pressed Kuwait to stop its slant-drilling and stick to its quotas, but at every step of the way, the Kuwaitis refused, and instead further antagonized Iraq. If Mexico did the same thing to the U.S., you can bet your ass there would be an invasion of Mexico City. Iraq appealed to the U.S. to help negotiate a settlement with Kuwait, thus leading to the Glaspie interview. It was at this moment that Saddam either (1) misunderstood what Washington’s concerns were and thought he was given a green light to take only the oil fields, as was implied in Glaspie’s later statement, or (2) was deliberately misled into an invasion of Kuwait. The second alternative is not that unlikely, when you consider that the U.S. had been training for this exact scenario for over 6 months.

The U.S. at no time acted to negotiate a settlement between the disputants. Indeed, it appears that every effort was made to provoke Iraq into an invasion. If we take a broad historical perspective, noting that the major foreign policy goal of the U.S. is to prevent independent economic development, then this fits into a very consistent pattern. We will not know for certain for many years, until internal documents are released, but it seems likely.

Finally, it is quite clear that what I said was true: Saddam did obtain what he interpreted as permission to invade Kuwait. Whether this was a misunderstanding or a set-up is an open question.

Perhaps you should consider that maybe the ambassador thought that Iraq was planning on only seizing the or or two of the northern islands that Kuwait owns on the Persian Gulf. Iraq had pressured Kuwait to let them lease these islands during their war with Iran during the 80’s in order to give the Iraqi navy greater access to the Gulf. When they refused, this angered the Iraqis, especially since the Kuwaitis and Saudis were relying on Iraq to defend the peninsula from Iran. I do not have an online source, but if you really don’t believe me go down to the library and check out “The Gulf Conflict: A Political and Strategic Analysis” by Roland Dannreuther.

I doubt this was a huge game of deception for the sole purpose of a military excercise as you seem to imply. Especially when you said that we were allies with iraq prior to the war. They were still a member of OPEC, and we know what that all means. There would be no reason for destroying Iraq at this moment in time, especially if we ended up letting the same government stay in power after the war…