09.24.06
US deaths in Afghanistan & Iraq pass 9/11 total
AP has the story:
U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America’s history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.
The latest milestone for a country at war comes without commemoration. It also may well come without the precision of knowing who is the 2,973rd man or woman of arms to die in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, or just when it happens. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Not for the first time, war that was started to answer death has resulted in at least as much death for the country that was first attacked, quite apart from the higher numbers of enemy and civilians killed.
Historians note that this grim accounting is not how the success or failure of warfare is measured, and that the reasons for conflict are broader than what served as the spark.
The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more men in each of a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor in the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan. The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.
Despite a death toll that pales next to that of the great wars, one casualty milestone after another has been observed and reflected upon this time, especially in Iraq.
There was the benchmark of seeing more U.S. troops die in the occupation than in the swift and successful invasion. And the benchmarks of 1,000 dead, 2,000, 2,500.
Now this.
“There’s never a good war but if the war’s going well and the overall mission remains powerful, these numbers are not what people are focusing on,” said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. “If this becomes the subject, then something’s gone wrong.”
Beyond the tribulations of the moment and the now-rampant doubts about the justification and course of the Iraq war, Zelizer said Americans have lost firsthand knowledge of the costs of war that existed keenly up to the 1960s, when people remembered two world wars and Korea, and faced Vietnam.
“A kind of numbness comes from that,” he said. “We’re not that country anymore — more bothered, more nervous. This isn’t a country that’s used to ground wars anymore.”
Almost 10 times more Americans have died in Iraq than in Afghanistan, where U.S. casualties have been remarkably light by any historical standard, although climbing in recent months in the face of a resurgent Taliban.
As of Friday, the U.S. death toll stood at 2,693 in the Iraq war and 278 in and around Afghanistan, for a total of 2,971, two short of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Pentagon reports 56 military deaths and one civilian Defense Department death in other parts of the world from Operation Enduring Freedom, the anti-terrorism war distinct from Iraq.
Altogether, 3,028 have died abroad since Sept. 11, 2001.
The civilian toll in Iraq hit record highs in the summer, with 6,599 violent deaths reported in July and August alone, the United Nations said this week.
A new study on the war dead and where they come from suggests that the notion of “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” has become a little truer over time.
Among the Americans killed in the Iraq war, 34 percent have come from communities reporting the lowest levels of family income. Half come from middle income communities and only 17 percent from the highest income level.
That’s a change from World War II, when all income groups were represented about equally. In Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, the poor have made up a progressively larger share of casualties, by this analysis.
Eye-for-an-eye vengeance was not the sole motivator for what happened after the 2001 attacks any more than Pearl Harbor alone was responsible for all that followed. But Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. in the middle of mobilization, debate, rising tensions with looming enemies and a European war already in progress. Historians doubt anyone paid much attention to sad milestones once America threw itself into the fight.
In contrast, the United States had no imminent war intentions against anyone on Sept. 10, 2001. One bloody day later, it did.
Strangely enough, none of the neo-con and right-wing war supporters—the Bill Kristols, Rich Lowrys, Rush Limbaughs, Jonah Goldbergs, Paul Wolfowitzes, Dick Cheneys, Bush family members, Bill O’Reillys, Ann Coulters, Sean Hannitys—none of that crowd have died in this war. Or served. Their support is offered from a very safe distance. Not, they would say, that they afraid. But the “war of ideas” is every bit of important as the actual war—and it turns out that they have more ideas than courage.
Wow! The Army is revolting against the Bush Administration
From the LA Times, this surprising story:
The U.S. Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, current and former Pentagon officials said.
“This is unusual, but hell, we’re in unusual times,” said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.
Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service’s funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.
According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, or nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army’s budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker’s request a 41% increase over current levels.
“It’s incredibly huge,” said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. “These are just incredible numbers.”
Most funding for the fighting in Iraq is supposed to come from annual emergency spending bills, with the regular defense budget going to normal personnel, procurement and operational expenses, such as salaries and new weapons systems.
About $400 billion has been appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through emergency funding measures since Sept. 11, 2001, with the money divided among various military branches and government agencies.
But in recent budget negotiations, Army officials argued that the service’s expanding global role in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism — outlined in new strategic plans issued this year — as well as fast-growing personnel and equipment costs tied to the Iraq war, have put intense pressure on its normal budget.
“It’s kind of like the old rancher saying: ‘I’m going to size the herd to the amount of hay that I have,’ ” said Lt. Gen. Jerry L. Sinn, the Army’s top budget official. “[Schoomaker] can’t size the herd to the size of the amount of hay that he has because he’s got to maintain the herd to meet the current operating environment.”
The Army, with an active-duty force of 504,000, has been stretched by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About 400,000 have done at least one tour of combat duty, and more than a third of those have been deployed twice. Commanders have been stepping up their complaints about the strain, saying last week that sustaining current levels will require more help from the National Guard and Reserve or an increase in the active-duty force. Read the rest of this entry »
Bad justice and injustice
The NY Times has a fascinating report about a weird system they have in New York of allowing completely incompetent people to act as judges, unsupervised and unchecked:
Some of the courtrooms are not even courtrooms: tiny offices or basement rooms without a judge’s bench or jury box. Sometimes the public is not admitted, witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth, and there is no word-for-word record of the proceedings.
Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.
But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.
These are New York’s town and village courts, or justice courts, as the 1,250 of them are widely known. In the public imagination, they are quaint holdovers from a bygone era, handling nothing weightier than traffic tickets and small claims. They get a roll of the eyes from lawyers who amuse one another with tales of incompetent small-town justices.
A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went to court in that North Country village seeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only refused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”
A black soldier charged in a bar fight near Fort Drum became alarmed when his accuser described him in court as “that colored man.” But the village justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler and a high school graduate, denied his objections and later convicted him. “You know,” the justice said, “I could understand if he would have called you a Negro, or he had called you a nigger.”
And several people in the small town of Dannemora were intimidated by their longtime justice, Thomas R. Buckley, a phone-company repairman who cursed at defendants and jailed them without bail or a trial, state disciplinary officials found. Feuding with a neighbor over her dog’s running loose, he threatened to jail her and ordered the dog killed.
“I just follow my own common sense,” Mr. Buckley, in an interview, said of his 13 years on the bench. “And the hell with the law.” Read the rest of this entry »
Interesting trend for Authoritarians
Kevin Drum has a post on an interesting trend: until recent years, authoritarian-inclined people didn’t much vote, and when they did, they tended only slightly to vote Republican. But things have changed.
More from Pandora
I’ve blogged before about the music site Pandora. Now I read about 15 ways to get more out of Pandora:
- 1. New browser window: In Firefox, open Pandora in a new browser window instead of a Firefox tab. You won’t use up as much memory this way. For example, my CPU usage shot up to 39% with Pandora in a tab; Pandora in a window? 16%.
- 2. Shut it down: Turn Pandora completely off about once every two hours. The player tends to get, for lack of a better term, stuck, and doesn’t do as good a job finding your stuff the longer it plays. Turning it off and on every once in a while seems to resolve this issue.
- 3. Put Pandora in your system tray: Another way to streamline your Pandora playin’ is the PandoraBrowse, a free Windows only app that sticks Pandora in your system tray for easy access. Just right-click on the icon to bring Pandora up if you need to tweak your stations
- 4. Pandora standalone: Again, Windows only; download the free OpenPandora and have Pandora run as a standalone interface on your desktop; it hides in your system tray when you’re all done. I’ve used this successfully to listen to music AND have about 27 Firefox tabs open, and haven’t had any serious browser crashes and/or memory drains yet.
- 5. Rate 5 every 60: One thing I’ve found that works well in teaching Pandora to play your faves is take just five or ten minutes an hour to rate songs, yay or nay. You’d be surprised at how much better your playlist will come back.
- 6. Share your music. Take advantage of the shared songs feature. I have found my best radio stations this way.
- 7. Request one song. Get more music added to one particular station by requesting one particular song. Adding just one song will add over a hundred songs (on average) to each Pandora station. For the tightest adherence to the kind of music that you want, just try adding five songs to a new station and then listen to it for at least a week before adding any more music.
More at the link, natch.
Study-worthy lecture notes
The Niece will be interested in this technique, and perhaps The Son and The Younger Daughter will teach their classes how to do it.
More coffee
“I have a fever, and the prescription is, ‘More coffee!’”—thanks to MindSpin. I just placed another order with Baltimore Coffee & Tea. They have great coffee. Give it a go.
The Gift of Entrepreneurship
My family has always had its entrepreneurs. The Younger Daughter, who is the Family Archivist and is going through the Family Photos, found a photo of a white-haired gentleman with four furry pigs. On the front, a handwritten arrow pointing to the man and the text “This one is Pop!” (”Pop” was the name for my mother’s father.) And on the back, “Pop bought the pigs for $25.00 & fed them 3 mo. & sold ‘em for $25.00!! He didn’t make anything but he had the company of the pigs!! Gee!”
The Daughter notes, “Good to see a patriarch getting such respect.” Yes, indeed.
1,000 Lowfat Recipes
The Sister reports that she uses Terry Blonder Golson 1,000 Lowfat Recipes more than any other cookbook she has—and that every recipe she’s tried has been good. YMMV, of course, but I also use it, and it is indeed a good cookbook.
“Legalize” is a loaded term
Just got this from the Marijuana Policy Project:
An excerpt from an article on the poll in last Friday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, the largest newspaper in Nevada:
A ballot initiative to allow Nevadans to possess small amounts of marijuana for recreational use has a better chance of passing than most people think, according to a newly released internal poll conducted on behalf of the proposal’s backers.
In the new poll, respondents were read the actual text that will appear on their November ballots. Of the 600 likely Nevada voters interviewed statewide by a respected national polling firm, 49 percent said they would vote yes on the question and 43 percent said no.
Previously, survey after survey has shown that Nevadans are resistant to a ballot initiative that would, in its words, “control and regulate marijuana.” But those results, such as a recent Reno Gazette-Journal poll that found 55 percent of likely voters opposed to the measure and just 37 percent in favor of it, were misleading because they asked the wrong question, advocates of the marijuana initiative said.
Other polls on the initiative have tended to ask whether respondents favored a move to “legalize” marijuana, a word that doesn’t appear in the ballot language, said Neal Levine, campaign manager for the Committee to Regulate and Control Marijuana, the Nevada initiative’s backers. The committee is largely supported by the Washington, D.C., based Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-legalization group.
“The word ‘legalize’ is a politically charged term,” Levine said in explaining the difference between his poll and others. “It gives people the false notion of a free-for-all, marijuana on every corner. That’s not what we’re proposing. We’re proposing a very tightly regulated system where we’d get institutional safeguards and tax revenue.”
… “There’s a lot in the ballot language (of the initiative) that really appeals to many people,” pollster Paul Goodwin said. “When people are read the entire measure as a package, they like it a lot better than when they’re just asked whether they want to legalize marijuana.”
Goodwin said his firm’s extensive experience with California’s ballot initiatives had taught him that “the best method is to read people the actual language, even if it’s long and hard to get through.”
You can read the full article here. A win is now within reach. Would you please help us carry the momentum through to Election Day, by donating $10 or more to the campaign today?
Here’s a brief (90-second) animated video explaining the Nevada initiative. And here are some marijuana FAQs.
Airline jujitsu: check valuables without having them lost
This is so cool: if you have to check something quite valuable (e.g., a camera, a computer, or the like) and you happen to want the airlines not to lose it, include a starter pistol in the luggage. There’s then a special check-in procedure (and special luggage required), and the luggage is carefully tracked to prevent loss. No extra charge, though. Very clever.
Omega-3, a true superfood
I’ve blogged about superfoods before (here, here, and here). The latest issue of New Scientist, has an excellent article on diet, “The Good, the Fad, and the Unhealthy,” with several informative sidebars. This one, on omega-3, is worth pondering:
All kinds of foods, from Brussels sprouts to peanut butter and potatoes, have been touted as brain food. Sadly, these are little more than old wives’ tales, but there is one well-known brain food that has solid evidence on its side: fish.
No nutrient has garnered as much supporting evidence for promoting mental health as long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, in particular eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which are plentiful in oily fish such as tuna and salmon. And the potential benefits are huge: globally, more working days are lost to depression than any other illness. In the UK, 1 in 10 people are depressed at any given time, and for 1 in 20 it is a lifelong problem (New Scientist, 24 August 2002, p 34).
Back in 1998, Joseph Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and lipid biochemist at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) in Bethesda, Maryland, noticed that depression was up to 60 times rarer in countries such as Taiwan and Japan, where people eat a lot of oily fish, compared with the US and Germany where they don’t. In particular, he noticed that in countries that consume a lot of fish, rates of bipolar disorder, post-natal depression and seasonal affective disorder were lower. Read the rest of this entry »
Question on Kiva
A sometime correspondent recently emailed me to ask whether I had actually made any loans through Kiva, and how well it worked if I had.
I’ve made quite a few loans through Kiva. Reading the stories of the struggling entrepreneurs in Honduras, Bulgaria, Uganda, Cambodia, and other countries, one is irrestibly drawn to making a loan. A small loan of $25 to $50 can be a big help, and you regularly get reports of how they are doing.
It’s very easy to make a loan: you can use your credit card, and it’s just like an on-line purchase—only it does more good.
When the loan is fully repaid, you can make new loans with that money, or donate it, or get it back.
Take a look. It’s a fine way to help.
