By: PakistanPal

Eric S. Margolis

Congressman David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, has come up with a novel idea: American should pay for the wars they are waging.

Obey’s proposal, which is backed by ten other congressmen, sounds startling – until one realises that both the Bush and Obama administrations have never properly financed their foreign wars by forcing Americans to pay for them through higher taxes.

Instead, Washington has deferred the $1 trillion to date costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars by simply adding them to the national debt, and paying interest on the balance owing.

So very few Americans feel the real financial costs of these wars. Future generations will get stuck with the bill.

But this kind of deceptive national accounting is becoming increasingly difficult in the face of President Barack Obama’s $1.4 trillion deficit this year, and his impending decision to send 30,000 to 40,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. Each American soldier in Afghanistan costs $1 million per annum, according to the US Congress Research Service. Thirty or forty thousand more US troops will thus cost $30 to $40 billion in additional war costs on top of the $200 billion annual cost of garrisoning Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of this money will have to be borrowed from China and Japan.

Obey and his allies want to impose a graduated surtax on Americans of 1-5 per cent, depending on their income level, to fund the actual costs of what are now Obama’s wars. Otherwise, warns Obey, the huge cost of keeping up to 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan will ‘destroy the other things we are trying to do in our economy.’ Chief among which is health care.

In a clear choice between guns or butter, Obey estimates ten years of war in Afghanistan will cost the same $900 million as providing a comprehensive health plan for all Americans. Unfortunately, chances of a war surtax passing Congress are nil. While the Afghan and Iraq wars are increasingly unpopular among Americans, a tax increase at a time of over 10 per cent unemployment will ignite the same kind of furious reaction that met President Obama’s proposed national health plan, and endanger Democrats facing 
 midterm elections. As the Obama administration appears set to plunge deeper into the Afghan morass, the real costs of Afghanistan and Iraq are still being concealed from the public and Congress. The $200 billion annual cost for both wars is only a part of the growing expenses faced by Washington.

The annual bill for US intelligence, which employs over 200,000 people, has doubled to $75 billion, in large part to support foreign wars and operations against anti-US Muslim groups. Costs of occupying Afghanistan rose to $300 billion this year, and will increase sharply next year. Operations in Iraq will cost $684 billion in 2009.

Washington spends $25 billion funding foreign armies, the bulk of which goes to the Mideast, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Aid to Islamabad will rise to $15 billion over the next five years, including secret ‘black’ payments.

The US supports 168,000 ‘contractors’ in Iraq, many of them gunmen. CIA runs 74,000 mercenaries in Afghanistan. The new fortified, 50 hectare US Embassy in Baghdad will cost $700 million; the new embassy in Islamabad, $800 billion. Islamic militants call them ‘crusader castles.’

Add to these costs the expense of maintaining fleets in the Gulf and Indian Ocean, and military bases in the Gulf and Diego Garcia to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; hugely expensive military airlift; $100 per liter fuel delivered to US forces in Afghanistan; and, of course, financial inducements to many smaller nations to send handfuls of troops to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Thus the real cost of Afghanistan and Iraq is much higher than $200 billion annually. Yet President Obama, heedless of such costs, appears determined to expand the Afghan War. It seems clear that ‘peace candidate’ Obama has fallen increasingly under the influence of America’s powerful military-industrial-financial complex and neoconservative ideologues. In short, the same calculus of forces that guided the Bush administration!

Even America’s mighty economy cannot for long support waging wars across the Muslim world. Unaffordable wars have been the ruin of many an empire, and the American Raj seems headed in the same direction.

Eric Margolis is a veteran US journalist who reported from the Middle East and Asia for nearly two decades

We succeeded in building the democratic State of Israel and bringing the ideas of human rights and equality to the darkest places populated by tyrants and dictators.

This is the words of Natan Sharansky, who represent Jewish Agency for Israel. He explains that Israel has succeeded  because we were empowered by thousands of years of dreams and prayers of  «Next year in Jerusalem».

«In the years before my arrest I was in fact the unofficial spokesman of two movements – a human rights movement pressing for democratic reforms in the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Jewry movement seeking the right of Jews to become free».

«In those years I was often pressed by my comrades in arms on both sides to make a choice between these two wars. You have to decide, they said, are you the fighter for human rights for everybody or are you fighting for the rights of your own tribe?»

Do you belong to the world of universal values or to the world of nationalism?

I must say, I personally never felt that I needed to choose because I felt that they are deeply connected. The battle for freedom and the battle for identity was the same battle for me.

I was one of many assimilated Jews only because the Soviet regime put it as an aim to deprive people deliberately of any loyalties to their faith, to their nation, to their family.

As the official definition of citizenship stated clearly – all Soviet people are cogs in the communist machine. The only value left for us was our physical survival and there was no reason to risk it.

When did this situation change?

In 1967, the Six-Day War in Israel reconnected us with our people, with our country and history, and gave us pride for being Jewish. We discovered our identity and this empowered us to fight for our freedom.

If you believe in the universal values of freedom and human rights, why bother to stick to your national or ethnic identity we are asked.

Doesn’t Judaism prize tikkun olam, perfection of the world at large, as its highest value?

Why insist on staying part of a small tribe, when the great, global melting pot makes nationalities seem like nothing more than sentimental reminiscences?

This choice between freedom and identity is a false one. The Iron Curtain was brought down and hundreds of millions found their freedom only because we found the source of strength in our pride and in our identity.

Source: Natan Sharansky is a former deputy prime minister, and presently the Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel. He was speaking to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America.

My comment:

Who has empowered the Jewish people?

I guess it is the God of Israel. Its easy to take credit for success, and the final restoration of the state of Israel.

But why do you not give God the credit?

Its easy to blame God, for the exile and 2.000 years in diaspora, and equal easy to take credit for the reunion and victory in 1967

Convoy 3 – Return to Gaza – a humanitarian aid convoy to the Gaza Strip will depart from London on Sunday 6th December 2009.  Convoy aims to arrive in Gaza on 27th December – one year on from the start of the bombardment that killed so many.

The route can be veiwed below.

UK —> France —> Italy —> Greece —> Turkey —> Syria —> Jordan —> Gaza

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On December 27, 2008, the Israel Defense Forces began their assault on the Gaza Strip in what they called Operation Cast Lead. 13 Israelis and as many as 1400 Palestinians were killed in the three weeks of fighting. The war enjoyed wide support among Israelis: according to the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, 94% of Jewish Israelis (76% of Israel’s population) supported the attack. Operation Cast Lead caused enormous suffering in Gaza and has been a thorn in the side of Israelis since its commencement. Numerous human rights organisations have issued reports on the conflict accusing both sides of war crimes, and the Israeli government has denied any but the noblest intentions. How did we get here?

This essay uses national role conception theory to explain how Israel’s political culture approved of Operation Cast Lead and permitted the latest brutal attack on the Palestinians. You can find it at the following link.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/23348184/Paving-the-Road-to-Gaza-Israel-s-National-Role-Conception-and-Operation-Cast-Lead