By Brigitte L. Nacos
As the various scandals related to the administration’s
selling of the Iraq war (i.e., Plamegate),
its shabby treatment of injured servicemen and –women, and the
FBI’s “errors” in secretly demanding large numbers of telephone, e-mail and
financial records make headlines, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York
Times has written a compassionate column about the need for all of us to
sacrifice in times of war. He compares President Bush’s lack of leadership in
this respect with the shining examples that Presidents Roosevelt and Wilson set
during WW II and I. He mentions the forthcoming book by Robert Hormats (The
Price of Liberty: Paying for America’s
Wars) in which the Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs International states,
“In every major war that we have fought, with the exception of Vietnam, there was an effort prior to the war or just after the inception to re-evaluate tax and spending policies and to shift resources from less vital national pursuits to the strategic objective of fighting and winning the war,” said Mr. Hormats, a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (International). He quotes Roosevelt’s 1942 State of the Union address, when F.D.R. looked Americans in the eye and said: “War costs money. ... That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other nonessentials. In a word, it means an ‘all-out’ war by individual effort and family effort in a united country.”
After mentioning that the high costs of the Iraq war left the U.S. Army short of money and thus the ability to spend on up-keeping its facilities, Friedman suggests that the American people would have responded positively, if asked to “pay a small tax to fill that gap.” Moreover, he urges readers to help by donating to organizations that help returning and fallen service-men and –women and their families. While his initiative in support of those who fight the war is laudable, the comparison between Iraq and the two world wars is more than a stretch.
The earlier wars were exclusively against nation states—the so-called “war on terrorism” is against non-state actors--except if you have hard evidence against state sponsors. The Bush administration has always sold Iraq as part of the overall fight against terrorism. The President’s propaganda of fear worked in the years following the 9/11 attacks and enlisted overwhelming public support for the invasion of Iraq. But when more and more Americans realized that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destructions and that the liberated Iraqi people did not welcome the American-led coalition forces with open arms but rejected them as occupiers, presidential appeals for sacrifice wouldn’t have worked.
The election results last fall demonstrated that the Iraq war is for the majority of Americans not their war but the Bush administration’s war. I am against the “Patriot Tax” that Mr. Friedman suggests (not only because it would play into the common misuse of the term in the post-9/11 years), and I am against a war tax across the board. The Congress should insist on rolling back all tax breaks for the super-rich and for corporate interests that the Bush administration and a compliant congress enacted. This would assure enough funds for the Walter Reed hospital, everything else veterans are entitled to, and then some.
We do not need a patriot tax--Congress must repeal the tax breaks for a few for the benefit of many--including veterans.
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