Never Forget Who's Benefiting from America's Endless Wars.

This video from Fahrenheit 9/11 about the businesses that benefit from war is as relevant to the current saber rattling about Iran as it was to our Iraq invasion. (Halliburton isn't the only beneficiary, despite the title of the video.)


And here's your quote of the day from the 2'20" mark of the video:

"War is always good for certain companies, I mean, that are in the war busi...the business of war."  --Sam Kubba, American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce

Video proof that Iraq and Iran are still indistinguishable to some people.

If the US decides to be the volunteer police force for this guy again, maybe we can create another ISIS.

The Quote of the Day: "Visit the Caliphate Before the Caliphate Visits You"

It's not just NPR, but NPR is what I listen to when I'm not listening to music, so I have to blame them for giving over much too much of their Iraq coverage to the experts who were part of the fuck-up of the last decade. Having a uniform and brass on one's shoulder should not automatically qualify a person for opinions about war and peace, but NPR has been interviewing a lot of officers lately.

Here's the one I heard on the ride home this evening. At the 3'45" mark of this interview, Marine Colonel Gary Anderson (ret.) disqualifies himself by using the forbidden jargon "Boots on the Ground," but ten seconds later when Audie Cornish asks him if those "Boots" should be worn by Americans, he gives us our quote of the day:

"Well, I know it's not a popular thing. The American people think that they're uh tired of war, but uh they're gonna be a lot less tired when some of his [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's] American passport holders come back and start shooting up shopping malls and things like that. I think the watchword that I would use is 'Visit the Caliphate Before the Caliphate Visits You.'" 

This "watchword" (another suspect bit of jargon) would fit perfectly coming from a mouth of a Bush Administration cabinet member and could have been written as one the publicity tropes coming out of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) in 2002-2003.

The Quote of the Week Came from Phil Donahue

"I’d very much like you to see the behavior of the congressmen. They were summoned to the White House by WHIG, White House Iraq Group. This is a Karl Rove committee that included the advertising warriors who named our invasion “Shock and Awe,” and “Rolling Thunder,” like video games. And they gave them their talking points: “A smoking gun will become a mushroom cloud”; “The longer we wait, the more dangerous he becomes”; “Saddam has more weapons of mass destruction than Hitler ever had”; “I see Hitler in Saddam Hussein.” And they read this, they’re looking down at the piece of paper, in what was at most a shell debate, that led to the deaths of over 4,500 service people, men and women both, not to mention how many injuries, we’re not even sure, we’re not even sure how many Iraqis are dead, and the refugees are in the millions.
This is unbelievable. You’ve got to see this debate. It’s truly a very instructive piece on what you can do if you scare the people. George Bush took this nation, the mainstream media included, and led it right into this war. It was an amazingly executed, brilliantly executed, plan. The politics of fear. ..."
--Phil Donahue

This is from an interview with Elias Isquith in Salon that was published on July 10 with the title, "Phil Donahue’s vindication: Media icon unloads on Fox, Cheney and what happened at MSNBC; Legendary TV host was fired for opposing Iraq war. Here's how he feels seeing the return of those who got it wrong." I couldn't resist repeating this particular part of the interview because he again speaks about the pivotal role of the public relations team, the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, that lied us into the war, and which I tried to beat the drum about on both trueblueliberal.org and whiggate.blogspot.com since 2005. Every time WHIG comes up in the news again, I make sure I check one thing; I search The New York Times to see if they have yet mentioned the White House Iraq Group in their news pages.  I may be missing something, but I still cannot find it mentioned outside the comments sections and opinion pages. If America's Paper Of Record (which gladly printed WHIG's aluminum-tube lies under Judith Miller's byline) doesn't recognize the existence of the WHIG, did it exist?

(This is being cross-posted on both the TrueBlueLiberal and Whiggate Update blogs)

The Fine White Whine of the Day is Emanating from My Alma Mater

A little bit of background first: Rutgers University invited one of the Iraq War principals, Condoleezza Rice, to be the 2014 commencement speaker. She may not ooze the same stench of pure evil that follows Donald Rumsfeld and Dick "Dick" Cheney in a thick visible cloud, but there should have been no surprise that offering her an honorary degree and $35,000 to speak would engender some protest from students and faculty and alumni. The invitation to Dr. Rice was not withdrawn by the University after growing protests, but she withdrew magnanimously over the weekend, "Commencement should be a time of joyous celebration for the graduates and their families. Rutgers' invitation to me to speak has become a distraction for the university community at this very special time."

Her supporters are shocked and stunned. In the following video we have a right-wing hack Steve Malzberg interviewing the head of the Rutgers College Republicans, Donald P. Coughlan, who states that "an overwhelming majority of students seemed to be really excited to see her" and that there was only a small vocal minority of 50-100 students protesting her appearance in the past week:
 

Even better is the young Republican's open letter to the University President Robert Barchi itself in which this statement appears: "As the protests escalated to your office, university property was damaged further frightening students who do not share the opinion of the protestors and preventing them from voicing a counter opinion." The "overwhelming majority" of more than 30,000 Rutgers students were "frightened" to speak in defense of Dr. Rice because of the actions a handful of people who broke a pane of glass and wrote on a wall? That's some fine white whine. (Maybe not a fine as the vintage white whine coming from Rutgers' New Jersey neighbor Princeton this week, but still some good stuff.)

Oh, unsurprisingly, Fox is all over the young Republicans' outrage and Newt Gingrich has piped in to say that Dr. Rice's decision not to appear at Rutgers is a result of "liberal fascism." Those liberals at Rutgers should just forget, or at least remain silent about, the hundreds of thousands killed and wounded and tortured under the Bush administration's wars (in the same way conservatives are forgetting the four Americans personally killed by Hillary Clinton in Benghazi).

Lies from a War Criminal. Eleven Years Ago Tonight.

President Bush Addresses the Nation  

The Oval Office 

March 19, 2003 10:16 P.M. EST

My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. 

On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. More than 35 countries are giving crucial support -- from the use of naval and air bases, to help with intelligence and logistics, to the deployment of combat units. Every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duty and share the honor of serving in our common defense. 

To all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces now in the Middle East, the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you. That trust is well placed.

The enemies you confront will come to know your skill and bravery. The people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military. In this conflict, America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality. Saddam Hussein has placed Iraqi troops and equipment in civilian areas, attempting to use innocent men, women and children as shields for his own military -- a final atrocity against his people. 

I want Americans and all the world to know that coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm. A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict. And helping Iraqis achieve a united, stable and free country will require our sustained commitment. 

We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people. 

I know that the families of our military are praying that all those who serve will return safely and soon. Millions of Americans are praying with you for the safety of your loved ones and for the protection of the innocent. For your sacrifice, you have the gratitude and respect of the American people. And you can know that our forces will be coming home as soon as their work is done.

Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities. 

Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures, and we will accept no outcome but victory. 

My fellow citizens, the dangers to our country and the world will be overcome. We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail. 

May God bless our country and all who defend her. 

END 10:20 P.M. EST

Still shocking. 

Still awful.

The Patron Saint of the Tea Party

As the lemmings with suicide vests are in the process of flying off the cliff in this third week of the GOP shutdown, it's important to look back at the forerunners of those who are currently waving Confederate flags in front of a black family's house in Washington DC. Specifically, we can't help thinking of March 23, 2003 every time we see the word socialist spelled "scholiast", or fields of waving yellow snake teabag flags, or a tricorner hat festooned with teabags.

On March 23, 2003, in the midst of nationwide demonstrations against the Iraq War, one unnamed flag-bandanna-bedecked Urteabagger and future meme confronted hundreds of antiwar protesters outside a Boeing missile factory and gave us the creatively-spelled sign that would launch thousands of imitators as soon as Barack Obama was inaugurated.

From a Google image search on the word "Morans"

Mr. Get-A-Brain!-Morans deserves to be the Patron Saint, or at least the Unknown Soldier, of the modern Tea Party.

All the Way with BHO? (redux)

[I originally posted this on October 1, 2011, but I felt it might be time to trot it out again and place it at the top of the blog. I don't feel like I need to add any specific references to today's debate about unleashing American weaponry against Syria.]

As we get further and further in time from the Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the parts of his legacy that stand out seem more and more impressive: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, & 1968, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the Department of Transportation, Head Start, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1968 inspired by Ralph Nader, the Endangered Species Act of 1966, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and more. The list of programs falling under the umbrella of The Great Society read like a Teapublican's wish list of the main elements of America's 20th-Century liberal legacy that they are working so hard to roll back.

But I remember 1968, and Lyndon Baines Johnson for me was a symbol of everything that was old and illiberal and out of touch, bordering on evil. It was because of one issue that overshadowed EVERYTHING that he did on the domestic front: Vietnam. LBJ didn't start the war and he had wide bipartisan support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 (416-0 in the House and only Morse and Gruening voting no in the Senate) that gave the green light for his escalations (think "Surges" in 21st-Century Newspeak), but it didn't take long for that police action in Southeast Asia to tear the country, and the Democratic Party, in half.

There are major differences between LBJ and BHO, beyond the fact that the Obama's Affordable Health Care Act doesn't hold a candle to the domestic achievments of Johnson. First of all, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq will always be Bush's wars and the crimes of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib will always belong to the previous regime. But the biggest change between the war of my youth and these endless wars of the 21st century is the lack of a draft. If the privileged children of the suburbs planning on peaceful futures saw those futures usurped by their birthday drawing a low number in a draft lottery, then there would have been millions of young people in the street against these endless wars no matter who was living in the White House. There are some rumblings of direct action against the current corporate-controlled power structure which supports the current wars and leans from center-right Democrats to lunatic Teapublican fringe, but "Occupy Wall Street" is never going to motivate millions to hit the streets the way the Moratoriums and other mass marches against the Vietnam War.

He has almost closed down the illegal war on Iraq, but with Barack Obama's failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his willingness to impose the death penalty by remote control on American cititzens this week, his surge in Afghanistan, and his acceptance of the Patriot Act and other assumptions of the so-called "War on Terror", it may not be too long before responsibility for these awful foreign policies starts sticking to his administration. And until the military stops draining our national treasure, he won't have the resources to accomplish even one hundredth of what LBJ did domestically during his brief time in the White House.

Without a Mention in a Times Article, Did the WHIG Really Exist?

I hadn't written anything on the WHIGgate Update blog since 2009, but on this tenth anniversary of Bush'n'Cheney's Shock'n'Awe show over Baghdad, I had to go back there and repeat one of my routine searches to see if The New York Times -- the "Paper of Record" -- had yet made one reference in its news pages to the WHIG, the White House Iraq Group.  

You can look at earlier entries on that blog from 2005-2009 to see more about this key group whose sole purpose was to sell us this illegal criminal invasion of Iraq (the obvious reason why would-be war criminals of BushCheneyCo rejected the authority of the International Criminal Court in 2002), but the Times still has NO news articles about this group whose existence has been widely reported in The Washington Post (though I'm having trouble today finding a live link to the key Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus article in the August 10, 2003 Post), by Bill Moyers, in The Huffington Post, The Daily News, and elsewhere, and publicly confirmed in print and video by key players like Scott McClellan.  But still, all the Times has to show when you search for existence of this group in its pages are a handful of Op/Ed pieces written (and written well) by Frank Rich.
This would all be just a strange omission in the journalistic record of this disastrous war if the Times' Judith Miller hadn't played a key role in spinning the WHIG's web of lies with her reporting about the aluminum tubes that were supposedly being used by Saddam Hussein to enrich uranium. Dick Cheney could then conveniently point to this reporting in "the liberal press" to help make his fictional case for war (with that glee about others' death and destruction which only the true chickenhawks among us can feel).
The Times at some point will need to come to terms with its own culpability in beating the war drums, but I'm no longer holding my breath.

(Crossposted from WHIGgate Update)

Remember Bush's War on Iraq when you think about who to vote for in 2012.

It's important for everyone to remember that the Bush/Cheney Administration was planning their attack on Iraq before 9/11/2001 and before they even took office. Don't believe anyone who now says they didn't know they were electing potential war criminals in November 2000.

There are four contenders left for the 2012 GOP nomination as the South Carolina primary results coming in  tonight. None of them has left any doubt about where stand on the question of war with Iran.

The Winner of Iowa, Rick Santorum, doesn't see any need to wait for formal US aggression to commence.  In the meantime, he's a supporter of terrorism within Iran. "On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that's a wonderful thing," Santorum says in the following video. Since Republicans hate science just as much as they hate Iran, this type of terrorism is especially satisfying to someone from the Neanderthal wing of the party like Rick.



The Winner of New Hampshire, Mitt Romney, who has been running for President for much of the last decade, is on the record in this debate from 2007 saying that he would not take tactical nuclear weapons off the table when dealing with Iran:


Tonight's Winner in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich, hasn't been running for President quite as long as the man he's beating tonight, but he has been just as bellicose as the men who won Iowa and New Hampshire:


There is a fourth member of the final four, Ron Paul, who hasn't won any GOP primaries, and probably won't win any.  I don't agree with him on many domestic issues (other than the civil liberties and drug law issues where he's 100% right), but he deserves to be heard putting his fellow Republicans in their place on the issue of war and peace.  He's schooling Rick Santorum in the following video, but he could be talking directly to Newt or Mitt just as easily:

Language Matters: The Iraq-War Recession and Iraq-War Deficit (a Marxist Perspective)

The simple Marxist insight into the nature of war, taxes, and language in tonight's blog post comes to us from Groucho and his brothers, not from their distant cousin Karl.

"War would mean a prohibitive increase in our taxes," the uniformed Freedonian functionary warns Groucho Marx's Rufus T. Firefly at the 8 second mark of this video from Duck Soup.  

Everyone knows that if the leaders of  Freedonia decide they need to attack Sylvania -- or the United States government needs to attack Iraq -- then those leaders need to raise taxes to pay for their war. Or almost everyone knows that basic fact of responsible governance. The Bush/Cheney administration slashed taxes on their rich friends and benefactors as they began multi-trillion-dollar wars throughout the Islamic world.  Of course some true-blue-liberal cynics might point out that their goal was to bankrupt the nation with their unfunded wars and unnecessary military spending so that they could roll back New Deal achievements like Social Security and Great Society programs like Medicare.
All they (and we) ended up getting for their troubles (besides the unnecessary deaths of Americans, Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, ...) were a massive recession and an astronomical deficit.
According to the True Blue Liberal style guide, the so-called "Great Recession" should always be referred to as the "Iraq-War Recession" and the multi-trillion-dollar deficit created in the Bush/Cheney era is the "Iraq-War Deficit."  Period. We should use those terms as single-mindedly as  conservatives who use the "job-killing" prefix before any mention of  environmental regulations.

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more."
– Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, 2007)

With attacks on everyone from Saddam Hussein to Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens was able to make enemies everywhere he went. I considered him an enemy starting in 2002 and 2003 and as long as the Iraq War raged.  He was one of the most dangerous supporters of the war because of his background in literature and the Left and he seemed to have given the subject of attacking Iraq more than a second's thought. Leaders in the US and the UK were able to point to his arguments as justifications for their aggression. Maybe only Judith Miller and the New York Times are more guilty of providing 'liberal' intellectual cover for war criminals. 
I would comment on the significance of the fact that he died on the day that the US was formally ending the war in Iraq, but we know (and he would agree) that such juxtapositions are purely random and coincidental.

Now that we're finally out of Iraq . . .

Harold Pinter on Donald Rumsfeld and "the palpable joy in destruction"

Part I of "Bush's War" on Frontline is just ending on Channel 13 as I write this. It seems in watching this program that the title could have been "Rumsfeld and Cheney's War". It's more obvious than ever that these two are the chief murderers of 4,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis over the last five years.

Watching it, I couldn't help thinking of this speech of Harold Pinter's before the House of Commons on January 21, 2003, two months before the beginning of the endless American war against Iraq. I originally posted this when it was announced in October 2005 that Pinter had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

One of the more nauseating images of the year 2002 is that of our Prime Minister kneeling in the church on Christmas Day praying for peace on earth and good will towards all men while simultaneously preparing to assist in the murder of thousands of totally innocent people in Iraq.

I've been taken to task recently by the American Ambassador to Britain for calling the US Administration a blood thirsty wild animal. All I can say is: take a look at Donald Rumsfeld's face and the case is made.

I believe that not only is this contemplated act criminal, malevolent and barbaric, it also contains within itself a palpable joy in destruction. Power, as has often been remarked, is the great aphrodisiac, and so, it would seem, is the death of others.

The Americans have the ostensible support of the 'international community' through various sure-fire modes of intimidation; bullying, bribery, blackmail and bullshit. The 'international community' becomes a degraded entity bludgeoned into the service of a brutal military force out of control. The most despicable position is that of course of this country which pretends to stand shoulder to shoulder with its great ally while in fact being more of a whipped dog than anyone else. We are demeaned, undermined and dishonoured by our government's contemptible subservience to the United States.

The planned war can only bring about the collapse of what remains of the Iraqi infrastructure, widespread death, mutilation and disease, an estimated one million refugees and escalation of violence throughout the world, but it will still masquerade as a 'moral crusade', a 'just war', a war waged by 'freedom loving democracies', to bring 'democracy' to Iraq.

The stink of the hypocrisy is suffocating.

This is in reality a simple tale of invasion of sovereign territory, military occupation and control of oil.

We have a clear obligation, which is to resist.

Sometimes it takes the subtlety of a Nobel laureate's pen to put this crime in perspective (once again).

This is what evil looks like.

Welcome to day one of year six of a war that never should have been fought.

And if you have dial-up, or you can't stand the smirking face of Dick Cheney, even in a 20-second video clip, here's the transcript:

MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC): Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting.
RICHARD CHENEY (Dick): So?
RADDATZ: So? You don't care what the American people think?
CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. There has in fact been fundamental change and transformation and improvement for the better. That's a huge accomplishment.

(thanks to Mustang Bobby at Shakesville for posting this)

Reality Check: While we're debating the merits of President Obama or President Clinton II, we still have this asshole in charge

While we're debating whether Obama and/or Clinton have the qualifications to be Commander-In-Chief, we get the occasional reminder of what happens when the office is held by someone's who's obviously unqualified. Today's reminder came in the form this quote from a George W. Bush teleconference with soldiers who are actually in Afghanistan:

"I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."
"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks."

--- George W. Bush (quoted here)

Well, I hope the soldiers took that gem of absolute bullshit with the grain of salt it deserved. Because when he was younger, and there was another war going on, and when he wasn't employed in any meaningful job, he did everything he could to use his place of wealth and privilege to stay out of Vietnam (a war to which he was glad to play lip service while playing soldier, when it didn't interfere with his social life). Though the Rovians were successful in distracting us from the Chickenhawk charges with an attack on one of its messengers, Dan Rather, there is still a good compilation of his rich-man's draft-dodging escapades available at AWOLBush.com.

• Never listen to any old man blabbing about how much he'd like to fight, if only he could (unless he's willing to send his daughters to have that romantic military adventure in his place).
• And never listen to any candidate who tells you that we have to finish a war just because it was started -- even if begun badly, for base motives. We're approaching the loss of 4,000 American soldiers in Iraq and the loss of trillions of dollars is dragging us deeper and deeper into the current Iraq-War Recession; do we have to lose 8,000 lives and quadrillions of devalued dollars to repay this blood debt?

. . . the truth is that every morning war is declared anew. Thus those who wish to continue it are as guilty as those who started it, perhaps more so, for the latter may not perhaps have foreseen the full horror of it.

--Marcel Proust
From the 2003 translation of Finding Time Again translated by Ian Patterson. This is Charlus talking to Marcel about the Great War raging on their doorsteps (p. 105 of the Penguin UK paperback).

The Real Dream Team! ... if you love their war and the Iraq-War Recession, you'll love the next four years with these two in power . . .

Check out the The John McCain for President, Hillary Clinton for Vice President War Party Fusion Ticket over at BuzzFlash.com for more details.

The main point, other than their shared support of the Iraq War, is this recent quote from Ms Clinton about the experience of the presumptive Republican nominee (to the detriment of the presumptive Democratic nominee):

"I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.
“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said. [read more here]

It's time for John Edwards and anyone else with a constituency in the Democratic Party to make a formal endorsement of Barack Obama. Now. They can no longer afford to wait the five and a half weeks until her next "firewall" in Pennsylvania on April 22. The divisive racial politics of her surrogates, and her direct questioning of Barack Obama's credentials, has gone beyond the pale (it's not Barack's fault that he didn't have the "experience" of being married to a President for eight years, privy to all [well, almost all] the President's secrets).

It's an understandable error Tom. It's just too many zeroes.

We can understand why Tom Tomorrow left three of them off of his most recent cartoon.
For those of us for whom wealth will always be defined by a "six-figure income", the eight figures of Barack Obama's 55,000,000 monthly haul in February is already in the fantasy realm. The ten-figure net worths (1,000,000,000+) of the world's billionaires already require us to stop and count zeroes. Why would any of us even entertain the possibility of a 13-figure bill (3,000,000,000,000+) for the Iraq War?
The cartoon isn't out yet; maybe today's Tom Tomorrow blog entry is apologizing for something else that was missing three zeroes in the first draft of next week's cartoon - - the national debt since Bush II's inauguration maybe - - but our guess is that he's writing about our money (and the money of our children and grandchildren) that was thrown into the bottomless pit that is Operation Iraqi Liberation.
On Monday, you can check for the March 10th cartoon (with all its zeroes?) here.

One more entry on the indefensible cost of the McCain/Clinton Iraq War

Watch this video and visit the American Friends Service Committee's "Cost of War" page and petition:

In the general election campaign, John McCain (and maybe Hillary Clinton) will have to be prepared to defend these indefensible economic costs of the Iraq war as well as its immeasurable human costs. Which one of the remaining three presidential candidates, getting a call from President Bush or Vice President Cheney at 3am, would have the judgement to say No? Which one would have had the foresight to keep us out of the current Iraq-War Recession?

Will the War Counter Hit $500 Billion Today?

Here's a screen capture of "The War in Iraq Costs" at National Priorities Project frozen at 7:45am on March 4, 2008. Less than five years after the invasion of Iraq, the cost of the war (not including, of course, the immeasurable human cost) will hit half-a-trillion dollars:
You can check the current cost by looking at the sidebar to your right, where I've been running this counter since this blog's birth in 2004, or by going to nationalpriorities.org, where you will find depressing comparisons of what could have been provided to the American people with those discarded dollars (like health care for 135 million people, scholarships for 70 million college students, or almost 10 million public safety officers).
---
As soon as I posted this, I drifted over to the Times, where I see that Bob Herbert published a piece this morning called the "The $2 Trillion Nightmare" about how the national debt will increase by that amount just because of George Bush's war of choice, and that the overall costs will be more like $3 trillion, or six times the milestone (or is that millstone?) being achieved today.
----
UPDATE 10:55am: The Huffington Post email I received this morning was headlined with Arianna Huffington's piece, "The $3,000,000,000,000 War is a Domestic Issue". This is obviously the issue of the day (but I hope not just an issue for today):

So will John McCain be called to account for the surge, and the rising costs of the continuing occupation the surge has enabled? Not likely. Getting the media to avoid a full accounting of the costs of the war -- both in terms of dollars spent and lives lost or ruined -- was one of the primary goals of the surge. And, in that respect, it has been sadly successful.

The thing about $3,000,000,000,000 is that, at a certain point, it becomes hard to ignore. As the red ink from the approaching recession continues to spill, you can bet the media will be all over the story -- the economy headlined as America's top domestic worry. The question is, will the media connect the dots between the war John McCain loves so much and the economic devastation it's helped cause? The answer could determine who is the next president of the United States.

-----------------------------

UPDATE 4:33pm: Or maybe $3,000,000,000,000 is a conservative estimate. Here's an Aida Edemariam article, "The True Cost of War," and a relevant Steve Bell cartoon, "The Six Trillion Dollar Chimp," from The Guardian.