Musing On The Military & The Monetary (*)

DO YOU SUPPOSE THE SHEEP WERE TALIBAN?

As the war in Iraq has degenerated and operations in Afghanistan not looking too good either, I have cut way back on blogging about collateral damage -- the unfortunate instances in which civilians are bombed by mistake.

It's quite simple: I have a deep empathy for the boots on the ground, if not the knuckleheads in Washington, and don't want to appear to be piling on. But with possibly hundreds of Afghan civilians being killed in U.S. bombing raids this year that were supposed to target the Taliban, the situation seems to be way out of control.

How out of control? So out of control that a senior British commander in southern Afghanistan says he had asked that American Special Forces leave his area of operations because the high level of civilian casualties they had caused was making it difficult to win over local people

Now I will be first to acknowledge that targeting terrorists and insurgents who live and operation among civilian populations is extremely difficult, but the U.S. has a well-documented track record of defaulting to the use overwhelming force -- the very thing that causes collateral damage -- time and time again in Afghanistan.

More here.

Meanwhile, I usually don't get my nose out of joint when the president says something utterly vacuous and isn't challenged by the White House press corpse.

But I did get a little more than upset yesterday when this feckless crew let pass George Bush's remark at a press conference that the best way to honor former NFL player Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death while serving in Afghanistan "is to find the truth."

The president, of course, failed to note that as commander in chief he has been notably uncurious about the ongoing scandal, including not telling a congressional committee about when he first learned of the Army's cover-up because it's a matter of executive privilege.

John Amato at Crooks and Liars more than carries my water on this one:

"And they ask us to blindly believe everything a man in uniform says with orders from their superiors . . . Supporting the troops in battle and in health is of paramount importance to all of us, but the Pat Tillman saga exposed the lies that the highest ranking generals were willing to commit in order to cover up the heroic Pat Tillman. A reporter should have followed up by asking Bush why they are using executive privilege over the Tillman documents."

Indeed.

And finally, word comes that the Bush administration – the folks who lavished enormous tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans -- opposes a Democratic effort to restore full educational benefits for returning veterans.

Senate Democrats want the government to pay every penny of veterans' educational costs, from tuition at a public university to books, housing and a monthly stipend. In other words, a return to the historic 1944 G.I. Bill, which put more than eight million U.S. soldiers through college and is credited by historians as fueling the expansion of America's middle class in the post-war era.

In recent years the benefit has dwindled; under the current law, passed in 1985, veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan can expect Uncle Sam to cover only 75 percent of their tuition costs.

Reports The Blotter:

"That's not enough, say Democrats and veterans' advocates.

"More than 450,000 used the benefit last year, at a cost to taxpayers of $2 billion, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which administers the program. The Democratic proposal would cost an additional $5.4 billion a year, the VA estimates -- and that's too much, it says.

"Keith Wilson, the VA official who oversees the education benefits program, told senators last Friday the proposal would make 'administration of this program cumbersome," and its costs would "tax existing VA resources.' "

More here.

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(*) The headline above is a riff on lyrics from "Poem For Peace" by the great Gil Scott Heron:

"The Military and the Monetary,
they get together whenever they think it's necessary.
War in the desert sometimes sure is scary,
but they beamed out the war to all their subsidiaries.
Tried to make So Damn Insane a worthy adversary,
keeping the citizens secondary,
scaring old folks into coronaries."