Across the Great Divide

Iraq Electrical Power: This Surge Isn't Working So Well.

During his service in Iraq, my nephew worked in an Army unit that disarmed IEDs, so we were relieved when he began working behind the wire as a logistics officer, where we figured he'd be safer. One day, his email contained a photo of his burned out-office, a portable prefab building that contained the unit's supply records and computers.

Sabotaged or hit by a rocket?

No, electrical fire. Now, it turns out faulty electrical work was a known, but inadequately addressed problem at U.S. bases in Iraq.

Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.

[...]

[An Army survey] noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.”

The Army report said KBR, the Houston-based company that is responsible for providing basic services for American troops in Iraq, including housing, did its own study and found a “systemic problem” with electrical work.

But the Pentagon did little to address the issue until a Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, was electrocuted in January while showering.

 

So much work was being contracted out in Iraq "that companies like KBR were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the operations. Some of the electrical work, for example, was turned over to subcontractors, some of which hired unskilled Iraqis who were paid only a few dollars a day."

While inadequate oversight by the military and KBR played a role in the problems on U.S. bases, this February 2006 article in an electrical engineering journal conveys the scope of reconstruction and some of the larger problems faced by electrical contractors in Iraq.

All of the money pledged so far for Iraq's reconstruction adds up to roughly $60 billion, according to a report last July by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). U.S.  officials whom I interviewed in Iraq this past October said that the current consensus was that the final tally might be as high as $100 billion. For comparison, in the first two years of their reconstruction after being devastated in wars, Germany, Japan, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan together received a total of $25.6 billion, in 2003 dollars, according to the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally created organization devoted to conflict resolution. The first European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt much of Western Europe after World War II, spent the equivalent of about $90 billion in today's dollars between 1948 and 1951.

Electrical power isn't just a problem for U.S. forces.

In the most recent survey by the International Republican Institute, a prodemocracy advocacy group in Washington, D.C., 2200 Iraqis were asked which of 10  different problems "requiring a political or governmental solution" was most important to them. The first choice, by a margin of about 10 percent, was "inadequate electricity." "National security" came in fifth; the "presence of multinational forces" was   seventh; and "terrorists" was eighth.

Is Iran the Right Target for WMD Controls?

This story reinforces for me how misguided Bush's WMD policies are. First, he attacks Iraq; now he's pressing sanctions against Iran. We have a big mess threatening to get bigger.

But where is the most likely source of terrorist bombs and bomb making? Pakistan.

Four years after Abdul Qadeer Khan, the leader of the world’s largest black market in nuclear technology, was put under house arrest and his operation declared shattered, international inspectors and Western officials are confronting a new mystery, this time over who may have received blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear weapon found on his network’s computers.

[...]

Yet even as inspectors and intelligence officials press their investigation of Dr. Khan, officials in Pakistan have declared the scandal over and have discussed the possibility of setting him free. In recent weeks, American officials have privately warned the new government in Pakistan about the dangers of doing so.

Last week I heard an expert on nuclear nonproliferation run down the reasons why Pakistan, not Iran, should be the focus of our most intense efforts to keep nukes out of the hands of terrorists. Couldn't locate the piece, so here's a paraphrase of his points:

• To stop the spread of nuclear bombs, control the ones already made and the necessary fissile material to build them. Weapons grade plutonium is the hardest-to-make and most expensive component in a nuclear weapon, and without it, there's no bomb. This is Graham Allison's "No Loose Nukes" principle I wrote about several years ago.
• Pakistan has an active nuclear program, about 100 nukes in its arsenal, and its "father" has already been established as a rogue weapon smuggler.
• Pakistan has an unstable government and is apparently so lenient with the Taliban in its border regions that Hamid Karzai has threatened to send in Afghan troops if Pakistan continues to harbor them.
• Osama bin Laden — remember him? — hangs out in that 'hood as well.

Countries — as opposed to terrorists — want nukes because their enemies have them, so those fears and conflicts between nations must be addressed, too. But a policy that focuses more on threatening Iran than stabilizing Pakistan seems off-base to me.

Join the Army and See College.

Ed Humes recently recently reminded us of the importance of the GI Bill in building America's middle class.

The original GI Bill — signed into law in 1944 — was one of the most important laws ever adopted by Congress. It transformed the nation after World War II in epic fashion, with generous college benefits, stipends, subsidized mortgages, business loans, and job training and placement.

Veterans got free rides to any college that would accept them. Tuition, books, housing and living expenses were all covered, giving rise to a new generation of scientists, inventors, teachers, doctors, civic leaders and artists. Low-interest, no-money-down home loans backed by the government made it less expensive to buy than to rent. Suburbia, widespread homeownership, college as a majority aspiration, the middle class — all were built on the back of the GI Bill. It reinvented the American dream.

My father was one of those dirt-poor veterans whose life on a remote Arizona ranch was forever transformed by the GI Bill, and my own family's even greater prosperity grew because of the head start we got in life from a stable household instead of a stressed and near-nomadic one.

For too many Americans, perhaps, this transformative investment is now invisible and irrelevant historic trivia. Two generations removed from the Great Depression and thoroughly indoctrinated in Norquistian economics, they see whatever success they may enjoy as purely of their own making and whatever failures as being of government-funded dependency.

But the truth is, America once honored military service and used it as a way/excuse to profoundly redirect the economy.  Today, sadly, our military gets the car magnets and lapel pins, but fends for itself once it moves back to civilian life.

Maybe this would be an okay bargain if all we were doing was entering an employment agreement that said: You're going to be a security guard — not at a mall or bank but at an Iraqi pipeline — with commensurate benefits but much higher risk.

Instead, the marketing is more like this: You will be defending your country from extremists and helping spread democracy; in exchange, we'll make sure you can afford to go to college.

It hasn't happened quite like that.

The department's most recent data show just 3 percent of veterans who entered a four-year college program in 1995 graduated by 2001, compared with a 30 percent overall graduation rate.

Another reason for that gap is the military experience itself. The Pentagon sells an educational dream to recruits. In addition to promising tens of thousands of dollars for a service member's college education, recruiters promise future soldiers that they'll be able to "attend college anywhere they are based and even in the combat zone through Internet classes offered from the college they are enrolled in."

But most Iraq War veterans say that’s a promise that exists only on paper.

The fulfillment of the promise is very different than it was for my father, who was able to take a full ride to the University of Colorado, where he very luckily met my mother.

Some young people, like my nephew, will still be well-served by their military service. With a college degree aleady under his belt, he's going on to further training instead of a second tour of Iraq. His unit will go there without him.

But for too many young people, their service will result in far less reward than my father's greatest generation received.

In the next post, I'll look at one way our nation's covenant with its military has diminished.

Of Course We Love the Troops. Didn't You Get the Card?

In the midst of the worst surge in mortgage defaults in seven decades, foreclosures in U.S. towns where soldiers live are increasing at a pace almost four times the national average, according to data compiled by research firm RealtyTrac Inc. in Irvine, California. As military families like the VerSteeghs signed up for the initial lower rates and easier terms of subprime mortgages, the number of people taking out Veterans Administration loans fell to the lowest in at least 12 years.
— "Foreclosures in Military Towns Surge at Four Times U.S. Rate," Bloomberg

That's right. Military families forsake a "government program" for the private market and get shown how well that works. They enlist to get help for college, end up spending a couple tours in Iraq and, if they are lucky, come back to find college tuition costs even more because states reluctant to raise taxes are underfunding their colleges and universities.

Republicans are going to start losing the military, and no amount of flag lapel pins and "strong defense" talk can conceal the gap between mouth and money.

 

The Name is Familiar, But I Don't Recognize the Place.

Last night Ruth had asked me if I'd seen some mutual friends lately and suddenly I was playing 20 questions with my own brain.

Yes, we saw them just after the new year. Went to the Institute and saw... (what exhibit was it?) the show. You know, woman painter... (poster reproduction in Kate's living room)... Taos... (why can't I reel this in?) married to a photographer (no, not Leibnitz; now two names are escaping me).

I waved my arms a bit before I gave up, and Ruth, my former teacher said, I'm the one supposed to be forgetting things, not you. And it was true she couldn't come up with Georgia O'Keefe, either.

Despite a good memory for faces I've seen only once, in recent years, familiar names have begun to abandon me at inconvenient times. It's not that I don't know who you are. I just can't retrieve what you are called.

Random, organic forgetting.

I also heard about two more bicycle accidents — four in a week — with one common thread: The victims have no memory of what happened. They were riding; they were on the ground. Not memory's trick so much as the  mechanism to allow them to go on without too much fear.

Adaptive, merciful forgetting.

We attended a reading of a work in progress that asked, among other questions, whatever became of the America that once saved Europe? How did we transform ourselves from liberator in fact to liberator in name only, spreading democracy and generosity as a veil for ruthless self-interest? When did we begin disappointing the hopes of friends and fulfilling the prophecies of our enemies?

Willful, perilous forgetting.

Saving Tape.

The Bush White House was more committed to recycling than I thought. And, no, I don't just mean bringing back Cheney and Rumsfeld or resurrecting supply side economic policy.

It so happens the administration recycled email backup tapes used to archive White House emails during the critical spring of 2003.

Presidents are responsible for preserving all historical records during their time in office under the Presidential Records Act. Congress is conducting an investigation into possible violations of this act, including the destruction of at least ten million White House email records.

In response to a judge's orders, the White House Office of Administration (OA), which manages the networks and email systems in the White House, filed a statement, which revealed that no emails were saved between March 1 2003 and May 22, 2003. "Office of Administration is preserving 438 disaster recovery backup tapes that were written to between March 1, 2003 and September 30, 2003. Of those 438 tapes, the earliest date on which data was written ... is May 23, 2003," according to the Bush administration filing.

This time period is perhaps the most historically significant of the entire Bush administration. It includes the run up to the invasion of Iraq, diplomatic jockeying to try and rally United Nations support for war, the possible planning for retaliation against former diplomat Joe Wilson, who was accusing the administration of lying about Iraq weapons of mass destruction claims, the use of harsh interrogations in the so-called "War on Terror", as well as the formation of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) – the ruling body in Iraq after the invasion – and the controversial policy decisions the CPA undertook.

Depressed, Soldier? Get on Down to the Pink House.

Penny Coleman,  the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life after coming home, attended a Pentagon-sponsored conference on suicide prevention. She found that "nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan — that's 300,000 men and women — have symptoms of post-traumatic stress or major depression."

At the end of 2007, the rate for completed suicides was 18.4 per 100,000, the highest since the Army started counting in 1980. The civilian suicide rate, which by the way does not reflect a population that is both young and screened for health, was 11 per 100,000, according to the latest figures from the CDC. And new Army figures show that 2,100 active-duty soldiers, Army alone, tried to commit suicide in 2007. That's about six a day. Before the Iraq war began, that figure was less than one suicide attempt a day.

However, the military doesn't track — or at least doesn't reveal — how exposure to combat relates to suicide risk.  The VA's mental health director was found to be suppressing suicide statistics. And while a psychiatry policy analyst for the Air Force surgeon general talked about how the DoD lives and breathes suicide prevention, commanders in the field refer to the behavioral health unit as the "pink house."

None Dare Call It Conservation.

Oil consumption in the United States dropped nearly 2 percent in the first quarter of 2008. If that trend holds, it would be the biggest percentage decline since the 1991-92 recession.
[...]
The statistics have some folks wondering whether the country has hit a consumption tipping point, amid $3.50-per-gallon gasoline and historically high crude oil prices.
— "Oil consumption at the tipping point in U.S.?" Star Tribune

The column quotes an academic who sees this dip as a sign conservation behavior is starting to take hold, but Jim Thill suggests it may just be more people can't afford the price, have no alternative to driving and are not happy about it.

With rapidly increasing demand in India and China, consumption in the U.S. isn't really the tipping point we should be concerned about, is it?  When consumption really tips, price per gallon of gas and high crude prices will only be the part we could see coming.

In another post, Jim sees something else going on, citing a news release from Consumer Watchdog that says:

The White House clings to a pallid strategy of blaming OPEC even as it continues buying oil off the market at a rate of 1.5 million barrels a month for a Strategic Petroleum Reserve that is already filled to near-record levels.

In 2006 when gas prices made their surge toward $3 a gallon, Bush announced the government would stop buying for the strategic reserve to help bring down domestic prices. Now, in a much worse economy, with a weaker dollar, unprecedented prices and a costly oil supply protectorate (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom) dragging on, Bush continues to top off the reserve tank. Jim says,

I've come to the conclusion that no major media outlet is ever going to announce in a headline "We've reached Peak Oil!" But articles like this one suggest that hoarding behavior at the highest levels is well underway.

And why not? Among the 12 nations with most of the world's proven oil reserves Canada (mostly), Mexico and the U.S. were in 2007 estimated to control 212 billion barrels. Middle-eastern "allies" like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq control 571 billion. The rest (about 322 billion) is under Iran, Russia, Libya, Nigeria and Venezuela. And most of those countries have state-owned or -controlled oil companies sitting on the reserves. The market will sort this all out, right?

Hoarding won't cover our oil habit. Expanding U.S. proven reserves beyond the current 21 billion barrels won't do it. Conservation in the U.S. — whether it's price-driven or principled — won't make much of a dent, and workable energy alternatives are a long way off.

We have to do all these things, of course. But I've come to the conclusion that no president is ever going to announce "We're bringing all our troops home from the Middle East!" Of the major presidential candidates, John McCain has come closest, but everyone in the running must by now know the truth of what they will be handed in 2009.

We can blame George Bush, but we also better look in the mirror.

Loyalty Beyond Reason.

This ad exec's speech titled "Loyalty Beyond Reason" came back to me after reading the New York Times story about the kept military news analysts, detailing how the Bush administration cultivated supposed experts to support its Iraq policies. The effort was reasonably successful in countering critical news reports and building domestic support for the early stages of the war.

The administration has been reasonably sophisticated in its campaign to create loyalty beyond reason, but ultimately, it's tough maintain mass brand loyalty to a terrible product — especially when you fail to recognize differences between international and domestic markets.

Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, gave his presentation to members of various U.S. defense intelligence agencies back in 2005. The first half is a stock ad guy speech, containing his firm's particular version of whatever superficial wisdom is current in the business.

Full of fake profundity. In a breezy style. Lightly tailored for the audience.

Like ad copy.

I’m going to show you how we create emotional connections with consumers, and how we inspire Loyalty Beyond Reason. The holy grail for marketers.

Roberts says that while reason leads to conclusions, emotion leads to action.

Using emotion instead of reason is a big, transformational idea, no matter what the problem is. From the biggest moral issue to the world of breakfast cereals. Emotion works.

Even if your problem is selling Brand America.

Most of the speech could be given verbatim at any new business pitch where the leader is brought in to present a few Deep Thoughts to set up the Big Ideas from the creative team. But once you get past that, Roberts actually offers some sound advice.

The War on Terror, he says, is fundamentally wrong.

Every time we refer to Terror, we invest in the presence and even the legitimacy of our enemy. Instead, turn the tables in a way that promotes an inspirational purpose for our people and our allies, and at the same time re-positions our enemy. Call our struggle the Fight for a Better World.

Before you barf, though, note that Roberts isn't just saying we should just change the language and imagery of the war. He argues that America should actually head in a different direction, redefine its mission as making the world a better place, and then tackle poverty, hunger and disease as top priorities.

As a businessman, here’s how I look at the figures. The US this year will spend half a trillion dollars on keeping the peace around the world, and fighting wars when we have to. But we’ll invest only $16 billion on overcoming global poverty and disease, which are also weapons of mass destruction, just with longer fuses.

It's not enough to simply repair what we've broken in Iraq. Or to make the world safe for democracy by tamping down other tyrants. If America wants to overcome hate, it has to give love, but that's not a pitch America's brand managers are ready to buy.

How We Learned to Love the War.

This piece at the Growth & Justice Blog, about how different sides use language to frame taxes, prompted Gary Miller to suggest I was employing "Orwellian linguistics."

Orwellian, though, doesn't very well fit one commentator's musing about the nuances of language. Instead, it describes a systematic government effort to  indoctrinate and mislead the public, and a much better (or worse) example is on display in a long investigative report published today in the New York Times.

[W]hen news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”
– "Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon's Hidden Hand"  

"Our analysts," whom the Pentagon seemed more concerned about arming than troops in the field, were the supposedly independent retired military talking heads on network television, many with undisclosed business ties to military contractors.

Set aside some time for this long article that exposes how the Bush administration cultivated a group of these men to echo its talking points. The effort began to help build a public drumbeat of support for attacking Iraq. (Analysts were told the Pentagon had no hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction, but they went along for the ride anyway.) The propaganda was so successful as networks copied each other to furnish expert military views that the Pentagon continued to provide special access, briefings and paid trips to influence their analysis. Often, the expert consensus contradicted journalist's reports on Guantanamo, troop levels, progress of the war and how mainstream news outlets were ignoring the "good news."

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

There's nothing wrong with former military officers going to work for defense contractors, where they can bring both expertise and access the companies need to develop products and services for the military. And as military analysts, they can provide a complementary perspective on the news to that provided by journalists and academics. But the combination of roles is a clear conflict of interest, which news organizations failed to disclose and the Pentagon exploited.

A mantle of independence was essential to this arm of the Pentagon's domestic propaganda effort. Analysts were required not to quote their briefers or disclose their contacts. Drifting too far from the official talking points could mean the loss of this valuable access to information and Defense Department officials that could help the analysts secure military contracts for their clients.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

The Times investigation reveals "a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated." The so-called analysts were actually "messaging" and rewarded for advancing the administration's views.

That's what I call Orwellian.