On wars, banks and love

For years I've been dreaming of going to war with some poor country rich in petroil, you know, making sure there will be enough juice for me and my fleet of cars, but with being stuck in our economic boom times, my work schedule simply didn't allow me to start one up. Now that I finally got to the point in my life where I could take some time off, I find out that I also need shit loads of money. According to latest developments, wars need to be paid for.

Iraq, Afghan wars costing $US3 trillion: experts

With the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war just days away, its cost is becoming clearer.

Ahead of that anniversary, two prominent US economists have come up with a new estimate on the cost to the economy of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That figure is $US3 trillion ($3.22 trillion)….

The estimated cost so far of Australia's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is roughly $3 billion. But Robert Ayson, the director of studies at the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, says he expects that figure to rise significantly.

Damn, trillions.... thats how many zeros? I'd be mighty surprised should my master card allow me that much. Not with the current global lending crisis anyway, so I guess my war/invasion of target country X has to wait a while, at least until I manage to save up enough dough for a deposit.

I hope you understand that I can't give you exact details about which nation I have in mind. Chances are the country's spies would find out about my invasion plans, their armed forces then propping up their defenses, which would make my job so much harder when its finally time to strike. I can reveal though that it is on an axis of sort, which makes it a very dangerous country.

Lucky here in Australia we had 11 consecutive years of Liberal Party rule, and as every privately schooled kid knows, a Lib government means fat times. So saving up the necessary deposit for my war should be a breeze, with business roaring and interest rates as high as they are. The Australian consumers are loaded, cashed up with real estate equity to a degree that they need to be restraint with rising interest rates. Rivers of honey and milk flowing everywhere.

We don't have no bubble, we won't get no trouble, oh yeah yeah yeah
Let the good times roll, Resources 'R Us
From aluminum to zinc, we got every thing, oh yeah yeah yeah

Wouldn't want to save up for my war chest anywhere else but in Oz, least of all places in the USA. Across the ocean the cogs in the economic wheels are creaking, creating this distinct grinding sound investors dread. It comes therefore as no surprise that Lady Prosperity decided she'll move out for a while.

The other noise thats starting to deafen US Americans is that of chicken coming home to roost. No point in pretending that their dilemma isn't home made, pissing against the wind requires that one changes pants from time to time. In the case of the US this means the entire financial system needs a new outfit, probably even a nappy change.

From riches to rags, the ol' classic. Once the most affluent nation in the known universe, today a banana republic where the Federal Reserve Bank has to resort to having helicopters hovering above Wall Street dropping cash on the nearly bankrupt. Providing massive loans to troubled financial institutions in return for nearly worthless mortgage securities.

Economist Professor Steve Keen, from the University of Western Sydney, made the following observations in an interview on the ABC's World Today:

ELEANOR HALL: What's your view? Is the United States already in recession?

STEVE KEEN: I'm sure it's in recession right now. It's a question of how deep it goes down, and I expect an extremely deep recession. And I'm noticing that quite a few commentators are now coming around to their view. They also suspect a severe recession to occur in America, and we have similar forces afoot in Australia.

We are benefiting from the highest terms of trade in our history at the moment. We're simultaneously running an enormous current account deficit, which is really a crazy combination.

So, we're very heavily reliant upon those prices remaining at unprecedented levels, and they will fall if there... actually there'll have to be a fall in those prices if America goes into recession, and then feeds through to China's demand for our resources and so on. That'll be very problematic for our currency and for our economy.

ELEANOR HALL: When will that hit, do you think?

STEVE KEEN: It's got to be in the next two years. Timing that's any more accurately than that is simply impossible because the whole timing depends upon when we turn around from accepting more debt to trying to pay our debt levels down.

Uhh Lordy, if I understand him right then Keen suggests that Australia will face a similar carnage to what the US is experiencing at the moment, all within the next two years. A world wide economic downturn, triggered by the unfolding US economic collapse, will reduce global demand enough to send commodity prices to lows not seen for quite some time, hitting Australia right in the export eye.

But lucky Australian families were smart enough to stash away their hard earned cash during the fat years, handing it over to people they didn't really know, but who have slick haircuts so expensive looking that who ever sported one had to be a financial mastermind. They tend to work in multi-story high rises, the biggest buildings in town, Australian banks and finance companies.

The really smart bank employees, who not just have expensive haircuts but also wear posh suits and swishy shoes, who have proper titles on their office doors, are normally found from the fourth floor up. They need to be high enough above ground to escape the blaring masses, coz when you make difficult financial decisions - like how to invest your clients’ money – you want to be able to concentrate as much as possible.

Those men and women are pedigree financial planners, making sure Australian retirement eggs and people’s savings are safe and sound. Just how secure Australian banks and their investments really are was illustrated in The Australian last week, when Adele Ferguson wrote a noteworthy assessment titled “Gambles in the balance”. Here an excerpt:

All the banks play the derivatives market. The latest Reserve Bank bulletin reveals that the banks' derivative exposure has more than doubled from $5.4 trillion in 2002 to $13.2trillion in December last year. Given the banks' total shareholder value is less than $100 billion, if even 1 per cent of these $13.2trillion derivatives contracts default because third parties get into trouble, the whole shareholder wealth would be wiped out and our banks could be broke.

To put it into perspective, Australia's annual gross domestic product is just more than $1 trillion and the total budget estimate for federal government expenditure in 2006-07 is $200 billion. Remember the Reserve Bank in its quarterly bulletin estimates that the total risk is $140 billion which, again, is more than the banks' total shareholder value.

What do you say to that? The global economy tanking and Australian banks up to their eyeballs exposed to risky debts. Great, a lose/lose situation. With banks leveraged to the degree they are, fat chance of them giving me the credit I need to pull off my planned invasion. On top of that, should the nation's economy really go as pear shaped as the author of the above article assumes it will, I wouldn't even be able to save up the needed deposit. How on earth am I ever meant to pay for my war?

The new Joint Fighter F-35 Lightning II costs around $200 million a piece, and my military adviser told me I need at least three of them. Plus plenty of cash for rockets, guns and bribery. All these figures confuse the hell out of me, so I made an appointment with my accountant.

We met last week in his office and discussed the plans and strategy. He was quite fond of my idea to kick of the invasion with a big bang, followed by more bangs, and promised me he would have a look into the costings of such an operation. Today he e-mailed me an excel spreadsheet with a recommended budget.

Far out brussels sprout, my jaw dropped to knee height when I opened it. The bottom figure, the one that is double underlined, had so many zeros I have to assume it is a trillion. And then, the comedian he is, he left me a footnote telling me that he reckons that with the current liquidity crisis and all I will have a hard time financing my war. As if I wouldn't know.

Where is Prescott Bush when you need him? He'd love to help me out, I am sure.

The Answer as per Robert H. Jackson

Hello people, thanx for stopping by. My last post was end of March, unreal how time seems to fly when you’re having fun. Been overseas on business for a week, moved into a new place, and then 9 days with my daughter Indiana (who turned eight a few weeks back), we had a ball. Can't wait to see her again in July.

Now, what really jolted me back into writing a post was a most interesting thread I've read on Moon of Alabama . It's titled In Favor of Killing American Troops. The gist of the original post is that the more US troops die in Iraq, the quicker the US regime will withdraw its troops. Of course, with the MoA's readership being largely left leaning US American, the ensuing discussion turned into a moral minefield.

How can it be right to wish for the death of US soldiers, who are only in Iraq because they were ordered to, and who, despite mistakes by their political puppeteers, are trying to be the good guys in the scenario.

Is it ethically alright to argue that the way out of the chaos in Iraq is more death and carnage?

As the post’s title clearly shows, the MoA’s author, the in Hamburg living Bernhard, takes the stance that it is. He got mega flak in various of the comments and the blog’s generally pretty united community took this home hitting opinion piece to reveal that when it comes down to it, like if it is desirable to see US soldiers killed to stop Iraq’s invasion, some of their viewpoints are actually worlds apart. Well written and imho quite valid arguments on both sides of the fence.

It really is a hard one. I understand Bernhard’s logic, it’s based on the assumption that the occupation itself is largely to blame for the bloodshed amongst Iraqis. The facts speak for themselves. The invasion of Iraq is a self-perpetuating disaster, brutally initiated and maintained by US forces. Every day since Invasion-day four years ago hundreds of innocent Iraqis had to die needlessly in the clashes, and, so the line of thought goes, the longer the US occupation of Iraq continues the more people will die. Hence, whatever helps to end the occupation is good for the Iraqi people.

And loosing steadily more instead of less US troops means the impact of the sheer numbers of GI’s killed will, as it did in Vietnam, finally ween the 30 or so percent left of the war supporting US public from any support for a continued large scale military presence in Iraq . The hope is that enough public outcry would eventually force the White House to bring the troops home. The more GI’s die in Iraq, the quicker that will happen.

On the other hand - and also quite plausible for people without crystal balls - a withdrawal of US troops could actually turn out to be the shifting from 2^nd to 3^rd on the ride down nightmare alley. Opposing militias and other violent elements could act with even less constraints, unleashing a civil war of unseen proportions, causing more hardship to the general populus than if the US troops were there.

Also, the majority of US voters, some 70% percent of the population is already in the "Bring’em Home"-camp, no more casualties needed to convince them. The remaining 30%, the ones who want to see the troops stay on till Christmas and Easter fall on the same day, are largely hardcore "USA Ueber Alles" punters, and more US deaths might not make a crumb of a difference to them.

And who’s to say that the US government, republican or not, would give in to increased public pressure. I certainly haven’t noticed any such inclination in the Bush/Cheney admin, and the current gang of leading Democrats haven’t shown the guts yet either to use the tools at their disposal to force the WH to start pulling out the troops. Be that Obama or Hillary, the political establishment in the US plans to have troops there for decades to come. The booty of having the finger on Iraq’s oil valves is simply too precious, too important is Iraq as a square on the strategic chess board to withdraw the troops in a hurry.

Now, many of the troops caught up in the Iraq quagmire are probably really nice people, citizens who joined the US, Polish, British or Australian Armed Forces for all the right motives, as in protecting their countries and people etc. However, they find themselves being used by their respective leaders to occupy foreign countries instead, fighting a civilian population. I understand that in many a soldier's case Iraq is not their war of choice, just people doing a job to feed their families back home. Is it right to hope for their deaths?

Hmmm, lets see. What are they guilty of? Lets ask a person with a bit of authority on the subject of war and guilt, Robert H Jackson, Chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials 1945:

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

"If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us." - Nuremberg Tribunal

Aha, according to the rules back then, they are part of a group of people who are committing what can be described as a war crime, the army conducting an aggressive war. The argument that the soldiers are simply following orders is in my eyes only mildly mitigating, they are still the ones committing the crime, the executioners. If you don’t want to be part of it, don’t be!! At least the soldier has a choice and a protective jacket, the many thousands of now dead Iraqis who died at their hands did have neither.

The Secret Carnage.

By SHERWOOD ROSS

An estimated 78,000 Iraqis were killed by U.S. and Coalition air strikes from the start of the war through June of last year, an article in "The Nation" magazine says.

The estimate is based on the supposition that 13 percent of the 601,000 Iraqis who met violent deaths reported by The Lancet study released last October "had been killed by bomb, missile, rocket or cannon up to last June," author Nick Turse writes in the June 11th issue of the weekly magazine...

With their decision to sign up with the military, in other words their expressed willingness to learn how to kill fellow humans as effectively as possible, their implied readiness to leave brains and hearts at the barracks gate, soldiers forfeit the entitlement to sympathy when KIA on foreign soil for no other reason than a decent pay cheque, owing it to the squad and family honour. They were dumb enough to let themselves be made lackeys of people with as little scruples as they can possibly get away with.

So, despite the harshness of it all, soldiers on the aggressor side are fair game. The laws established and applied in Nuremberg made sense then and do so today. Justice Jackson’s definition of war crimes does include what’s going on in Iraq and by inference legitimises the country’s resistance, at least in as much as it targets only occupation forces.

But the armed resistance doesn’t stop there, and that’s where the whole guilty and not guilty thing unravels. Nothing is as clear cut in Iraq.

Many of the same militias and insurgents who fight the occupiers are also engaged in atrocities amongst the civilian population, displaying a cruelty and indifference to innocent civilian lives which compares easily with the US brutality. These monsters also have to be stopped, if not brought to justice. Who’s gonna do that? Maliki’s goons? Blue Helmets? Hardly.

As the occupying force it is the US troops duty to provide security for the occupied nation’s population. Which requires and consequently legitimises their presence.

So, as twisted as it sounds, the resistance to the occupiers is legit, but so is the effort of the US to stop the resistance. How do you solve that one? A cat chasing its tail.

To conclude, imho the US and allied troops are guilty of instigating an armed conflict, causing the death of thousands of innocent people and wounding many thousands more, which by established measures can be classed as a war crime punishable with, depending on the degree of involvement, possibly even death (see Nuremburg). Should a US or allied soldier die in Iraq, he or she had it coming. Do I wish for their death? A slightly wavering No, on the grounds that I don’t wish for the death of anyone who isn’t really a vicious and savagely murderous person, which I don’t belief a great many of the soldiers are, such a blanket approach is idiotic.

I can’t really make up my mind if a complete withdrawal of US troops will benefit the general population. Despite my readings, I am too far removed from Iraq to make a really informed judgment, my prediction being though that the situation in Iraq - the current civil war between the various factions - will not change. It's hard to imagine that it could get much worse.

It is not that the US troops currently provide a great deal of security, if anything it’s the opposite. You don’t want to drive too close to a US army convoy. To an Iraqi hearing an Apache helicopter circling above is probably also not causing feelings of protection. I therefore believe that a withdrawal presents more a chance for the Iraqi people to come together and move forward as it does represent the loss of an effective and well-meaning guard of Iraqi rights and safety.

Naturally, the home coming soldiers should not be prosecuted, just as the ordinary German soldier wasn’t 60 years ago. But also just as 60 years ago, the leaders who orchestrated this war crime should be held accountable by some form of peoples court, maybe not to face the gallows like the Nazis back then, but at least with a decade of having to wear orange jumpsuits while living in a mesh cage the size of a single car garage, and if naughty (like talking without permission) being chained with both hands to the floor for hours on end.

Fat chance though guess, so the best I can realistically hope for is that as few as possible innocent Iraqis will have to pay with their lives the price levied by the parties involved in the process of the country finding its feet. At the same time I do hope that not more than necessary US and allied troopers will die in the time it takes for the WH to recognise the darkness of its decision to stay on, and issue the inevitable order to start with the occupation’s end.

I hope the goodwill left between the waring camps will be enough to allow a return to senses, particularly the one responsible for recognising that fishing for a positive way forward starts with throwing in a line.

Exit Under Construction

…If you stand up and say your policy is to bring about a withdrawal of all combat units by March 2008, that is noted by terrorist leaders. It is a source of encouragement and comfort,…

PM John Howard
Hansard
12th February 2007

What a classic, the COW will stay till the insurgency disappears, just like when one pushes a red hot iron in ones eyeball long enough the pain will go away.

The so popular coalition troops have to watch every step they make outside their fortresses, fear almost every person they meet on the streets. The hearts and minds who haven’t been won or arrested yet (lets say the insurgents and their supporters within the Iraqi population) are numbering in the millions.

The enemies of our troops have lived in that country/trench for generations and will do so for generations to come. US forces come for 6 monthly stints, with their wives and children back home in the U Safe America. They operate on a complete different time scale than the Iraqi population. For the COW soldiers to “wait out” the insurgency would mean they’d have to move there, probably forever.

Military counter-insurgency measures against an enemy who actually lives in the warzone is like punching your fist into a bucket of water, the moment you pull it out its back to how it was. I guess that is what the huge permanent bases are for, to leave the fist in the bucket (if permanent military bases in Iraq are such a good idea, maybe Australia should build one too), although I suppose they are seen by many Iraqis as ulcers with all the ugly consequences this will entail.

Despite the good intentions the troops have, their daily efforts to rebuild the country and finding the alleged bad guys, I am afraid to say, if anything, the US presence fuels the enemy’s recruitment drive. Been fighting the "enemy" now for 4 years in Iraq, but they don't seem to get less.

To stay the course as suggested by John Howard, to stick with the US till "the Iraqi people can look after their own security" or along those wishy washy lines, underlines the lack of strategies to deal with the current scenario.

Cheney, Howard and their ideological associates, who want to keep combat troops in Iraq till the day when US soldiers on leisure time can peacefully sit in a suburban café in Baghdad and mingle with the locals, till the day when the last "terrorist", militia man and insurgent has been captured or killed by Iraqi troops, envision a day that is as likely to arrive in Iraq as the Titanic in NY. No waiting will change this. Too many mistakes have been made by the captain and the guys on the lookout.

And still, in John Howard's support it is argued that the whole issue of deadlines for withdrawals is meant to make us feel better, the US and Australian electorate, rather than the Iraqi people themselves.

According to their way of thinking it is Senator Obama and Kevin Rudd and other friends of this withdrawal idea who should examine their motivations a bit more carefully.

However, many polls and surveys show that a lot of Iraqis want the US troops to leave, and I can almost guarantee that’s not because they want to make us feel better. More likely it’s because in a lot of areas living conditions have gotten progressively worse since the invasion, and that not just in terms of security.

If one actually examines the reasons for why the US troops are in Iraq, one might want to consider this:

…Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas -- reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to…

Kenneth T. Derr
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
Chevron Corporation
Speech To the Commonwealth Club of California
San Francisco, California
November 5, 1998

And, voila, 9 years later they have, more access than most other countries would give private corporations. Comments by analysts to the newly approved Iraqi National Oil laws:

…Iraq will not be capable of controlling the levels -- the limits of production, which means that Iraq cannot be a part of OPEC anymore. And Iraq will have this very complicated institution called the Federal Oil and Gas Council, that will have representatives from the foreign oil companies on the board of it, so representatives from, let’s say, ExxonMobil and Shell and British Petroleum will be on the federal board of Iraq approving their own contracts.

…the law certainly opens the door to US oil companies and the Bush administration winning a very large piece of their objective of going to war in Iraq, at least winning it on paper. The law does almost word for word what was laid out in the Baker-Hamilton recommendation, which I discussed previously on your show, which is, at the very basic level, to turn Iraq's nationalized oil system, the model that 90% of the world’s oil is governed by, take its nationalized oil system and turn it into a commercial system fully open to foreign corporate investment on terms as of yet to be decided...

IMHO, the motivations for the invasion are the determining factor for the time of withdrawal. The exit strategy for Iraq hinges on the original objectives being achieved. From the initial US support of Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran, to the harsh sanctions against Iraq after the Kuwait invasion, to Operation Shock and Awe, to Fallujah, to Abu Ghraib, I get the impression that the well being of the common Iraqi was never really the main concern of the West's engagement in that country. The primary objective appears to be more of economic and geo-strategic nature, oust Saddam Hussein and secure Iraq's oil supply for western oil cos, and whilst there establish some bases near Iran, Russia and Israel.

Saddam is dead, the oil laws are almost passed and the bases are as good as finished. And so, should the surge fail, which it is bound to do, the US military is according to Sec Def Gates planning to pull out some of its contingent fairly soon. Well, better see what Cheney and Howard have to say about that.