[Peace-discuss] On War, Obama Has Been Worse Than Bush

[C. G. Estabrook]

On War, Obama Has Been Worse Than Bush

by Anthony Gregory <http://original.antiwar.com/author/anthony-gregory/>, August 
26, 2011
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Obama said he would divert resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. To his 
everlasting shame, he has not broken this promise.

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, /Yeah, but Obama is/ 
ending/ the wars./

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.

So, during the run-up to the ascension of Obama to the throne, he was critical 
of the Iraq war. He said things like /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./

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.

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.

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.

In 2004, the position of the Democrats was always /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./

In '04, in the /Chicago Tribune/, Obama said, "There's not much of a difference 
between my position on Iraq and George Bush's position at this stage."

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."

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.

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.

To his credit, he hasn't put all his political capital into stopping it, 
although even there I would qualify my statements.

*Boots on the Ground*

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.

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.

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, /Yeah, we 
can't just withdraw/. (I suppose you can't just go into a country and bomb it 
and stay there for only eight years --- that would be reckless.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*Costly Wars*

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.

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.

Obama criticized Bush for financing wars off budget. In his first year Obama had 
a big supplemental-funding bill --- another broken promise.

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.

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.

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.

And on Iran, Obama continues to be belligerent when he caught Iran "red-handed" 
with that Qom nuclear facility. Iran /reported/ 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.

*Civil Liberties*

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.

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.

Even when they said they would try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civil court, the 
administration's position was /We'll try him, and we'll convict him, and if we 
don't convict him we'll still detain him./ So of course the American Right goes 
crazy because /how dare he be soft on terrorism/.

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.

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.

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.

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.

/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, "What Price War?: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Costs of Conflict 
<http://www.independent.org/publications/policy_reports/detail.asp?type=full&id=40>." 
Thank you to Jennifer Lewis for providing the transcript. Originally run at 
mises.org <http://mises.org>
/

/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.
/

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