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<p class="title">On War, Obama Has Been Worse Than Bush</p>
<div class="details3"> by <a
href="http://original.antiwar.com/author/anthony-gregory/"
title="Posts by Anthony Gregory" rel="author">Anthony Gregory</a>,
August 26, 2011 </div>
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<p>Obama said he would divert resources from Iraq to Afghanistan.
To his everlasting shame, he has not broken this promise.</p>
<p>The real critique of the wars certainly goes beyond the
numbers. It is good, however, to look at the figures. Most
people in the country know that Obama hasn’t exactly ended the
wars. I’m sure people say, <em>Yeah, but Obama is</em> ending<em> the
wars.</em></p>
<p>This claim is not obviously 100 percent false in every respect,
perhaps. And so we need to be careful when we get into the
details.</p>
<p>So, during the run-up to the ascension of Obama to the throne,
he was critical of the Iraq war. He said things like <em>This
war’s lasted longer than World War I, II, the Civil War; 4,000
Americans have died (and of course Americans are the only
people that matter in the war). More than 60,000 have been
injured; we spent trillions of dollars; we’re less safe.</em></p>
<p>These were very sound critiques of the Iraq war. A lot of us
made these kinds of utilitarian critiques. They’re almost
utilitarian anyway. I don’t think they are the most important
reasons to oppose the Iraq war, but they are important reasons;
they are sufficient reasons on their own, certainly. And Obama
did sound better on the Iraq war than Bush or McCain.</p>
<p>At the same time — and this is forgotten — he always was worse
on Afghanistan. The Democrats, from Kerry to Obama, were always
worse on Afghanistan. Obama’s position paper said he’s been
calling for more troops and resources for the war in Afghanistan
for years; he would divert resources from Iraq to Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Another point I want to make is on Iraq. He wasn’t antiwar; he
was always slippery on this war. I want to just relay a couple
of interesting points.</p>
<p>In 2004, the position of the Democrats was always <em>We
shouldn’t have gone in; now we’re in, we’re going to have to
get out one day, but it sure isn’t responsible to talk about
getting out now, because we need to be responsible; we need to
fix the country, and then we’ll get out.</em></p>
<p>In ’04, in the <em>Chicago Tribune</em>, Obama said, "There’s
not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George
Bush’s position at this stage."</p>
<p>Throughout the years, he voted for war funding once he was
senator, and he defended his votes. Presumably it would be wrong
to defund an immoral war. And in 2008, Obama hailed the Iraq
surge — a controversial policy harshly criticized by many
Democrats the year before — going so far as to tell Bill
O’Reilly that the surge "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."</p>
<p>In December of ’08, when he was the lame-duck president, Bush
signed the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi leadership,
which set the timetable for withdrawal. It was almost precisely
the timetable for withdrawal that Obama had proposed, within a
couple months.</p>
<p>So the official US policy, by the time Obama took office, was
that the United States would withdraw the troops from the cities
by June of 2009; and by the end of this year, 2011, the troops
would leave Iraq entirely. That was the policy when Obama took
power. He did not expedite that.</p>
<p>To his credit, he hasn’t put all his political capital into
stopping it, although even there I would qualify my statements.</p>
<p><strong>Boots on the Ground</strong></p>
<p>In Iraq, at the height of the surge, which worked beyond our
wildest dreams, there were 170,000 US troops in Iraq, and now
there are fewer than 50,000. Which, by the way, is about the
number that Rumsfeld and those clowns said that we would need
for the war. So, now that the war is kind of wrapping up, we’re
at the level that they thought we’d need to invade and conquer
and occupy and win.</p>
<p>In Afghanistan, meanwhile, Obama has fulfilled his promises,
unfortunately. Before 2006, except for a blip in July, there
were about 10 to 20,000 troops. And then by the time Bush left
office, unfortunately he ramped it up to 33,000 troops. By
mid-2010, there were almost three times as many — 91,000 troops.
Throughout 2009, Obama has almost tripled the presence in
Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Obama’s first defense secretary, Robert Gates, who by the way
was Bush’s defense secretary too, floated the idea the United
States might have to stay beyond 2011. And some Democrats on the
Armed Services Committee have said, <em>Yeah, we can’t just
withdraw</em>. (I suppose you can’t just go into a country and
bomb it and stay there for only eight years — that would be
reckless.)</p>
<p>The total number of troops fighting wars under Obama has been
higher than it was under Bush except at the end of Bush’s term.
At the first half of the Bush administration, which is when
there were people in the streets shouting, "Bush is a war
criminal" — when the Left was correct about something — there
were fewer troops.</p>
<p>There were more US fatalities in Iraq under Bush, although the
total number of US fatalities in 2009 and 2010 was higher than
it was in 2003, and higher than it was in 2008, the last Bush
year.</p>
<p>Let’s say we had a third Bush term. If he was planning to
withdraw gradually from Iraq and leave Afghanistan alone, I
think the trajectory would have been much better than it is
today, where Iraq is about where I think it would have been, and
Afghanistan is much worse.</p>
<p>Obama also boosted private contractors by about a quarter in
both Iraq and Afghanistan. As of January 2011 — of course, this
is government data and you’d be surprised how much they don’t
know what they are talking about — there are 87,000 contractors
in Afghanistan; 71,000 in Iraq.</p>
<p>There were more civilian contractors (including foreigners)
that died in the first half of 2010 than there were soldiers.
And some people are pointing out that shifting some of the
burden to contractors obscures what is going on.</p>
<p><strong>Costly Wars</strong></p>
<p>Obama always said that we are spending way too much; we’re
going to go line by line in the budget. And one of the only good
promises he made was to save money on Iraq. That’s how he was
planning to support everyone from cradle to grave. It doesn’t
really add up that way, but at least he wanted to cut spending
on something big.</p>
<p>And he did cut the spending in Iraq. But the spending has gone
up enormously in Afghanistan. Even adjusted for inflation, we
see that, other than Bush’s last two years with the surge, total
spending was lower for most of the Bush term on the two wars.</p>
<p>Obama criticized Bush for financing wars off budget. In his
first year Obama had a big supplemental-funding bill — another
broken promise.</p>
<p>The Afghanistan war has expanded out of control, and the war
makes no sense. The government says there are 100 al-Qaeda
members in Afghanistan, and so the troop levels are higher, more
people are dying and they want to stamp out the opium trade.
They can’t even stop people from buying crack four blocks from
the White House, not that they should try. This is the most
ridiculous war. It’s even a more ridiculous war than the Iraq
war in terms of the idea behind it.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Obama is drone-attacking Pakistan. He’s expanded
this war greatly. One or two million Pakistani refugees have had
to leave the Swat Valley. It’s one of the greatest refugee
crises since Rwanda. Obama’s bombed Yemen; he’s bombed Somalia;
he even threatened Eritrea, this tiny little country near
Ethiopia, with invasion.</p>
<p>In a normal country, when your government says it might invade
another country, people have a clue, but we’re at war so much
with so many countries no one even knows any of this stuff.</p>
<p>And on Iran, Obama continues to be belligerent when he caught
Iran "red-handed" with that Qom nuclear facility. Iran <em>reported</em> that
they had this facility that they hadn’t really started working
on yet, according to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which the
National Intelligence Estimate, the administration, and the
International Atomic Energy Agency all say Iran’s basically
following the law.</p>
<p><strong>Civil Liberties</strong></p>
<p>Warrantless surveillance has continued, and it’s been
normalized. The TSA outrages have gotten worse. Now the Left
thinks that you’re crazy if you oppose the police state, and the
Right is finally realizing the federal government shouldn’t get
to touch us like this.</p>
<p>Detention without charge has continued. Habeas corpus is
gutted. Obama was supposed to close Guantánamo within a year;
now it looks as if they are never going to close it. And even at
their best they’ll say we’ll have a "Guantánamo Lite" within the
United States.</p>
<p>Even when they said they would try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in
civil court, the administration’s position was <em>We’ll try
him, and we’ll convict him, and if we don’t convict him we’ll
still detain him.</em> So of course the American Right goes
crazy because <em>how dare he be soft on terrorism</em>.</p>
<p>Renditioning, this outsourcing of people to be tortured, has
continued, at least on some level. In 2009, they renditioned a
guy who wasn’t even accused of terrorism. He was accused of
knowing about supposed fraud related to defense contracting.</p>
<p>So they tied him to a chair; they deprived him of sleep; they
told him his family was in danger, that he’ll never see them
again — all the horrible stuff that happened under Bush, but he
was basically a white-collar criminal at worst.</p>
<p>The drone attacks are through the roof; there’s robot killing.
Bradley Manning, the likely whistleblower with WikiLeaks, has
been detained. And Obama used to say his administration would
protect whistleblowers. I guess he meant protect them with steel
cages.</p>
<p>We have the same basic trajectory on war, on spending, on civil
liberties, on foreign policy; the Defense Department is as
bloated as ever. People forget that both parties are the same on
pretty much everything, and foreign policy maybe more than
anything else.</p>
<p><em>This article is based on a talk delivered at the Austrian
Scholars Conference, March 7, 2011. The research culminated in
the Independent Institute policy paper, "<a
href="http://www.independent.org/publications/policy_reports/detail.asp?type=full&id=40">What
Price War?: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Costs of Conflict</a>."
Thank you to Jennifer Lewis for providing the transcript.
Originally run at <a href="http://mises.org">mises.org</a><br>
</em></p>
<p><em>Anthony Gregory is research editor at the Independent
Institute, the editor in chief at Campaign for Liberty, a
policy adviser for the Future of Freedom Foundation and a
columnist at LewRockwell.com. His website is
AnthonyGregory.com.<br>
</em></p>
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