When We Wonder Why

The British spend $3,400 and we spend $8,500 per person for health care…and the British system ranks #1 in quality…we ranked last.

The US is currently wobbling under the cumulative weight of a $17 trillion dollar national debt.  No one thinks this is a good thing, but it seems most of us think all sorts of things about this situation that completely miss the mark.

For instance, we have been steadily moving in the right direction, but opinion polls show an overwhelming number of us are not seeing this.  Our annual deficit (that creates the debt, one year at a time) peaked in 2009 as a result of the bank-driven near collapse of the economy and has been reduced by more than 50% this year…and it will be still lower next year. 

Polling data also shows that, while concerned, we remain both unwilling to cut programs and unwilling to raise taxes…the two steps we need to take if we want to increase the pace of moving in the right direction.  In fact, we only agree on one way to reduce the debt: reduce foreign aid.  Unfortunately, xenophobes have persuaded us that foreign aid is as much as 28% of our expenditures, when it is actually less than 1%, so that even eliminating foreign aid will have no impact on the debt.

When we wonder why so many of us are so misinformed, there are many culprits:  consumer culture saturating communication channels with a public pedagogy that encourages us to ignore science and forget our own history, our longstanding tendency to conflate irresponsibility with freedom, and elites willing to shamelessly mislead us…like our former Vice President Cheney did yet again this past week.

Cheney blamed our current president for the chaos in Iraq, because our current president implemented the withdrawal plan Cheney’s administration negotiated and signed, attempting to re-write history to erase his own errors that brought us to war in Iraq in the first place.  EJ Dionne reminds us…

On March 16, 2003, just days before the war started, Cheney sat down with the late Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press for what still stands as the most revealing of the prewar interviews. Cheney was adamant that “to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.”

A Rand study commissioned by Cheney found that more than 2 million American soldiers fought in the Iraq and Afganistan.

“We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he famously said, and proceeded to play down the very sectarian divisions that are plaguing the country now.

Think about exactly how wrong this statement is now and that, at the time, it is difficult to imagine anyone believing this statement to be true.  Meaning our VP was willing to simply lie to put our young men and women in harm’s way with no exit strategy or plan for how it might advance our national interest.  Fellow Republican, Rand Paul, claims that the billion dollar, no-bid, contracts Halliburton received for the war are the reason Cheney chose to ‘snooker’ the American public.

Russert asked: “And you are convinced the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites will come together in a democracy?” Cheney replied quickly: “They have so far.”

Since we have to assume Cheney is not stupid and he understands the politics of the Middle East, this comment can only be interpreted as another willful effort to mislead, and to put millions of American lives at risk for decades in the process.

Ah yes, regime change would work out just fine — better than fine. “Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad,” Cheney had told the Veterans of Foreign Wars seven months earlier. “Moderates throughout the region would take heart.” Plus a bonus: “Our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.” This was the war that would cure all that ailed us.

Thanks to the Cheney op-ed, we can see how Obama’s hawkish critics are out to create a double standard. Whenever they are called out for how mistaken they were about Iraq in the first place, they piously lecture against “relitigating the past” and say we must instead look forward. At the same time, many of them feel perfectly free to trash the president in extreme and even vile terms.