GOP Experiments in Tax Cuts and Immigration

The Kansas City Star describes Kansas jobs plummet in latest disaster for Sam Brownback’s tax-cut strategy.

The Sunflower State now has 1,700 fewer jobs than it did at the start of 2015.

Kansas has added a puny 5,600 total jobs in the last year — from July 2014 to July 2015.

The new information shows that the tax cuts that have drained the Kansas treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars the past two years are not working to attract employers and jobs.

Meanwhile, Missouri celebrated much better news in the latest BLS report. The Show-Me State gained 11,900 jobs in July, and now has added 30,900 for 2015.

Kansas lost 39,000 manufacturing jobs during the recession but has added just 4,000 since it ended.

David Atkins points out in Sam Brownback’s Kansas Disaster is Getting Even Worse, "But it’s important to remember that it’s not just about empathy and ethics. It’s about what works and what doesn’t. And every day in every way, we are learning that conservative approaches simply don’t work—not in terms of social policy, and certainly not in terms of economic policy."

And then with, Conservative Policies Just Don’t Work: Immigration Edition.

He pointed to this Washington Post story, Alabama tried a Donald Trump-style immigration law. It failed in a big way.

Alabama, which hosted the largest rally of Trump’s presidential campaign Friday night, had been a test kitchen for Trump-style crackdowns on undocumented workers — and it had not gone well.

In 2011, a new Republican legislature and governor enacted HB 56, the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. Chief sponsor Micky Hammon warned the undocumented population that he would “make it difficult for them to live here, so they will deport themselves.” Renting a house or giving a job to an “illegal” became a crime. Police were empowered to demand proof of citizenship from anyone who looked as if he or she might lack it. School administrators were instructed to do the same to children.

Asked about the law, Alabama voters rarely say that it worked. Large farms spent millions training new workers. The Byrds conceded that the agriculture sector suffered after some immigrants fled the state. “Most of them left and didn’t come back,” said Terry Darring-Rogers, who works at a Mobile law firm specializing in immigration.

So Atkins concludes:

Some people will never learn, no matter how much self-inflicted failure they endure. When Josh Duggar and countless similar self-righteous conservatives are exposed as cheating molesters, it doesn’t cause conservatives to question whether their belief system might be causing those problems. They just double down. When abstinence education causes more teen pregnancy than responsible sex education, conservatives double down on the slut shaming. When tax cuts on the rich and wage cuts to government workers lead to economic recession, Republicans don’t question their core economic beliefs; they just claim they weren’t allowed to go far enough.

That inability to come to grips with failure and adjust course, and that insistence on doubling down in the face of adverse results, is part of why many consider modern conservatism to be an almost cultic movement. Its adherents long since stopped caring about the evidence or empirical results. It’s all about who can prove truest to the faith, and maximally annoy and rebel against the evil liberal heathens. Policies and results are really beside the point.

Update: Here's a bonus one, Peter Beinart writes in September's Atlantic, Republicans Don't Understand the Lessons of the Iraq War

Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the GOP presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal. According to recent polls, GOP voters now see national security as more important than either cultural issues or the economy. More than three-quarters of Republicans want American ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq, and a plurality says that stopping Iran’s nuclear program requires an immediate military strike.

What explains the change? Above all, it’s the legend of the surge. The legend goes something like this: By sending more troops to Iraq in 2007, George W. Bush finally won the Iraq War. Then Barack Obama, by withdrawing U.S. troops, lost it. Because of Obama’s troop withdrawal, and his general refusal to exercise American power, Iraq collapsed, ISIS rose, and the Middle East fell apart. “We had it won, thanks to the surge,” Senator John McCain declared last September. “The problems we face in Iraq today,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal argued in May, “I don’t think were because of President Bush’s strength, but rather have come about because of President Obama’s weakness.”

He describes some of the history, the extra troops, the emphasis on to protecting civilians rather than fighting, the shifts in Sunni/Shia balances and the bribes to get Sunnis to stop fighting. This all led to a real decline in the violence which Republicans today remember.

But they forget something crucial. The surge was not intended merely to reduce violence. Reducing violence was a means to a larger goal: political reconciliation. Only when Iraq’s Sunni and Shia Arabs and its Kurds all felt represented by the government would the country be safe from civil war. As a senior administration official told journalists the day Bush announced the surge, “The purpose of all this is to get the violence in Baghdad down, get control of the situation and the sectarian violence, because now, without it, the reconciliation that everybody knows in the long term is the key to getting security in the country—the reconciliation will not happen.”

But although the violence went down, the reconciliation never occurred. According to the legend of the surge, Iraq’s collapse stems from Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops at the end of 2011. “If we’d had a residual force of 10,000 to 12,000,” Senator Lindsey Graham said last year, “I am totally convinced there would not have been a rise of al-Qaeda.” In reality, the prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, began persecuting the Sunnis—thus laying the groundwork for their embrace of ISIS—long before American troops departed the country. As early as 2007, writes Emma Sky, who advised both Petraeus and his successor, General Ray Odierno, “the U.S. military was frustrated by what they viewed as the schemes of Maliki and his inner circle to actively sabotage our efforts to draw Sunnis out of the insurgency.”

The problem with the legend of the surge is that it reproduces the very hubris that led America into Iraq in the first place. In 2003, the Bush administration believed it could shatter the Iraqi state and then quickly and cheaply construct a new one that was stable, liberal, democratic, and loyal to the United States. By 2006, many conservatives had realized that was a fantasy. They had massively overestimated America’s wisdom and power, and so they began groping for a new approach to the world. But then, in 2007 and 2008, through a series of bold innovations, the United States military bribed, cajoled, and bludgeoned Iraqis into multiple cease-fires. The Iraqi state was still broken; its new ruling elite showed little of the political magnanimity necessary to reconstruct it in an inclusive fashion. And the Band-Aids that Petraeus and his troops had courageously affixed began peeling off almost immediately. Nonetheless, Republicans today say the Iraq War was won, and would have remained won, had the U.S. left 10,000 troops in the country after 2011.

But this line of thinking is troubling nonetheless, because the same wild overestimation of American power that fueled the war in Iraq now fuels the right’s opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran. To hear hawks tell it, the United States can scuttle the current deal, intensify sanctions, threaten war, and—presto—Tehran will capitulate. But Iranians have been living under the threat of attacks from America or Israel for more than a decade now. And British and German diplomats have warned that if the U.S. Congress torpedoes the agreement, sanctions pressure on Iran will go not up but down, as countries that have lost billions by limiting their trade with Tehran stop doing so.

Why Did We Invade Iraq?

James Fallows writes The Right and Wrong Questions About the Iraq War. He opposes asking the question, “Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq?” for a few good reasons. One, it's too easy and two it doesn't tell you anything because leaders don't get to make decisions with hindsight. I disagree a little on the second point. With hindsight you get to evaluate your decisions and learn from mistakes. Fallows basically gets to this point too, but my pet peeve is the politicians who say “I don’t answer hypotheticals”. My response to them is "Then how do you learn?".

Fallows continues with a good history lesson for the lead up to the Iraq war. We decided to invade Iraq a couple of days after 9/11.

New York Times Accidentally Undermines John Bolton "Bomb Iran" Op-Ed in Own Pages

The Intercept points out that the New York Times Accidentally Undermined John Bolton "Bomb Iran" Op-Ed in Own Pages. It seems they added a link to his text

In an unusual touch, a link added to the original online edition of Bolton’s op-ed directly undermines Bolton’s case for war:

…Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq…can accomplish what is required.

U.S. and Israeli politicians often claim that Israel’s bombing of Iraq in 1981 significantly set back an already-existing Iraqi nuclear weapons program. The truth is almost exactly the opposite. Harvard Physics Professor Richard Wilson, who visited the ruins of Osirak in 1982 and followed the issue closely, has said the available evidence ‘suggests that the bombing did not delay the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program but started it.’ This evidence includes the design of the Osirak reactor, which made it unsuitable for weapons production, and statements by Iraqi nuclear scientists that Saddam Hussein ordered them to begin a serious nuclear weapons program in response to the Israeli attack."

Interestingly the Times has changed the link. It now points to this 1981 article, Israeli Jets Destroy Iraqi Atomic Reactor - Attack Condemned By U.S. and Arab Nations. According to The Intercept it originally pointed to this 2012 Washington Post opinion piece, An Israeli attack against Iran would backfire — just like Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq.

The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion

Vice News reports The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion

"Congress eventually concluded that the Bush administration had 'overstated' its dire warnings about the Iraqi threat, and that the administration's claims about Iraq's WMD program were 'not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.' But that underlying intelligence reporting — contained in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was used to justify the invasion — has remained shrouded in mystery until now."

"For the first time, the public can now read the hastily drafted CIA document [pdf below] that led Congress to pass a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, a costly war launched March 20, 2003 that was predicated on "disarming" Iraq of its (non-existent) WMD, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and "freeing" the Iraqi people."

The NIE also said Hussein did not have "sufficient material" to manufacture any nuclear weapons and "the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program."

But in an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, then-President George W. Bush simply said Iraq, "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons" and "the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."

"As with much of the information on the overall relationship, details on training and support are second-hand," the NIE said. "The presence of al-Qa'ida militants in Iraq poses many questions. We do not know to what extent Baghdad may be actively complicit in this use of its territory for safehaven and transit."

So now (yet again) we can be sure that the President lied in order to start a war. So what should we do about that?

Iraqis under ISIS control say their lives have gotten better

Vox reports Iraqis under ISIS control say their lives have gotten better.

"One of the drivers of the conflict is that Iraq's government, which is dominated by the country's Shia Muslim majority, has badly mistreated the Sunni Muslim minority based in the north. ISIS, who are Sunni extremists, have risen in part by exploiting Sunni resentments against the government, and by linking up with local and national Sunni armed groups. So by actually improving life for the mostly-Sunni population of Mosul, ISIS is making people there more likely to support ISIS's takeover, more likely to resist any efforts by the Iraqi army to retake the city, and less likely to help the army uproot ISIS."

"The trick that ISIS has pulled off here is seizing Mosul but not ruling it directly. The group appears to have handed authority for the large city over to local, tribal, Sunni armed groups. Those groups share ISIS's hatred of the Iraqi national government, so they're happy to help oust the Iraqi army, but unlike ISIS they are not as fixated on imposing extremist Islamism. 'There is no ISIS in Mosul,' a 58-year-old Mosul resident told the Financial Times. 'The ones controlling city are now the clans. The power is with the tribes.'"

Vox also describes, The real roots of Iraq's Sunni-Shia conflict.

"When 2003 came along, a lot of Shias and certainly a lot of Kurds welcomed it. They saw it as their deliverance as Shias and Kurds as much as it was the deliverance of Iraq. On the Sunni side, there was no such sentiment because there barely existed a sense of Sunni identity before 2003. It simply didn't exist in Iraq. Now, what you see is the reverse. The Iraqi government is not popular with anyone, the popularity of the government is rock bottom, I'd say, but Shias are more likely to accord the state, the post-2003 order some level of legitimacy. Whereas there is a body of opinion of among Sunnis who just do not ascribe any legitimacy to it whatsoever."

"Again, the parallel with race relations is very obvious. Sunnis weren't concerned with or particularly knowledgeable about sectarian dynamics because it wasn't an issue for them. They did not perceive themselves to be on the losing end of sectarian dynamics, they weren't even aware of sectarian dynamics! So this is a game that they only started playing in 2003. The other thing is that, in 2003, they had to form a Sunni identity whether they liked it or not because the system mandated it. The system required and made communal identity the central political marker. So they had to find that presentation along identity lines."

17 reasons not to trust Dick Cheney on Iraq

Vox's 17 reasons not to trust Dick Cheney on Iraq really should be called 17 lies Dick Cheney told about Iraq.

Even Fox News Host Megyn Kelly called him on it, Dick Cheney sits stunned as Fox News turns on him: ‘History has proven that you got it wrong’. Well she was just asking questions that other people have.

The mess in Iraq proves Obama was right to leave

Matthew Yglesias writes in Vox The mess in Iraq proves Obama was right to leave

"The logic on display here [by the hawks] shows the toxic self-justifying nature of American military adventures. If a war accomplishes its stated objectives, that goes to show that war is great. If a war fails to accomplish its stated objectives — as the Bush-era surge miserably failed to produce a durable political settlement in Iraq — then that simply proves that more war was called for.

But there is simply no reason to believe that the presence of American soldiers in Iraq makes a durable political settlement more likely, and there never has been. If eight years weren't enough, why would one more — or two more or twenty more — be the key to success?

The truth is the opposite. The speed with which the apparent gains of the surge melted away in the face of Iraq's entrenched domestic political problems underscores how futile the US-led campaign there was."

Iraq

Zack Beauchamp has many posts on Iraq on Vox. His 11 facts that explain the escalating crisis in Iraq is a great summary of all the points. I learned a lot.

I completely agree with Kevin Drum on this turn of events, No, Staying in Iraq Wouldn't Have Changed Anything.

This is one of those Rorschach developments, where all of us are going to claim vindication for our previously-held points of view. The hawks will claim this is all the fault of President Obama, who was unable to negotiate a continuing presence of US troops after our withdrawal three years ago. Critics of the war will claim that this shows Iraq was never stable enough to defend regardless of the size of the residual American presence.

And sure enough, I'm going to play to type. I find it fantastical that anyone could read about what's happening and continue to believe that a small US presence in Iraq could ever have been more than a Band-Aid. I mean, just read the report. Two divisions of Iraqi soldiers turned tail in the face of 800 insurgents. That's what we got after a decade of American training. How can you possibly believe that another few years would have made more than a paper-thin difference? Like it or not, the plain fact is that Iraq is too fundamentally unstable to be rebuilt by American military force. We could put fingers in the dikes, but not much more.

I did in fact always think that after we left, whenever that was, that Iraq would break down into sectarian violence again. Shocker it's Sunnis vs Shias with the Kurds off to the side. No I didn't anticipate the Shia administration being so oppressive to the Sunnis and I didn't expect Iran to send forces to help the government. I also didn't anticipate how the war in Syria would affect Iraq. I know that drought had a big effect in Syria and don't know about the affected regions in Iraq. None of those things make me think we should go back in. I do wonder if Joe Biden wasn't right all along, that the country should just be broken up into three; but that's for them to decide.

Why We Did It

I watched the Rachel Maddow "documentary" on MSNBC last night on Why We Did It, referring to the Iraq War. Her conclusion was that it was about oil. Shocker! There wasn't much new information presented. There were meetings in the fall of 2002 before the war about oil but it fits nicely into the planning for the peace after the war and that since the Iraqi economy was based on oil, this wasn't that surprising.

A few times they showed some documents that were reports on the meetings (one was from BP meeting in the US) and they pulled a few quotes, but if you paused and read the whole document it wasn't particularly damning. They weren't talking about dividing up the oil or taking control as much as trying to figure out a system to get oil flowing after the war. Okay. Apparently the goal was to get oil flowing to keep the global price down, which to me doesn't line up with oil executives trying to make a fortune. Wouldn't they want higher prices? The one time they talked about something being previously unrevealed before this show was about a post war oil meeting happening in executive offices in Houston instead of in Washington in some military facility. That doesn't seem like a smoking gun to me.

Like many people suspected at the time, the war was about oil and the WMD argument was a lie. That's not right (and I think should probably be a war crime) but we've known that for years. But once you get past that, does it matter if the goal was to personally profit from the oil (say as a large share holder in Haliburton) or to ensure the world market was stable? Those seem like different things to me. Of course a decade of war didn't stabilize oil prices and if ensuring the long term energy needs of the west was the goal, it would have made more sense (to me) to move us off of oil and onto other sources (even as we were rapidly expanding our own fracking).

Anyway I was disappointed in the show, I didn't learn anything.

Lie After Lie: What Colin Powell Knew [11] Years Ago Today and What He Said

This was posted a year ago, so yesterday was the 11th anniversary of Colin Powell's speech to the UN. I knew he was wrong, I didn't know how wrong. Lie After Lie: What Colin Powell Knew Ten Years Ago Today and What He Said

"Colin Powell made his Iraq presentation at the UN ten years ago today, on February 5th, 2003.

As much criticism as Powell has received for this—he calls it 'painful' and something that will 'always be a part of my record'—it hasn't been close to what's justified. Powell was much more than just horribly mistaken: he fabricated 'evidence' and ignored repeated warnings that what he was saying was false.

Unfortunately, Congress never investigated Powell's use of the intelligence he was given, so we don't know many of the specifics. Even so, what got into the public record in other ways is extremely damning. So while the corporate media has never taken a close look at this record, we can go through Powell's presentation line by line to demonstrate the chasm between what he knew, and what he told the world. As you'll see, there's quite a lot to say about it."

The Nisoor Square Shootings

The Nisoor Square Shootings is an interactive comic) by Dan Archer. It's a really interesting way to tell a story.

"Interactive timeline comic about the Blackwater shootings in Nisoor Square, Baghdad in 2007, where 17 Iraqi civilians were killed. The comic takes our slogan 'there is more than one truth' to the next level, by showing several different perspectives on the incident pieced together from news reports and eyewitness testimony. Dan Archer creates non-fictional, journalistic comics to offer a new perspective on US foreign and domestic policy and give voice to stories that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. Visit his website at www.archcomics.com and follow him on Twitter @archcomix."

FYI, here's another comic timeline, about music in the last few decades.

Louis C.K. Blogs USO Tour

Louis C.K. is a comedian and he has a show on FX. It's a half hour long and he basically plays himself (a divorced 40-something comedian with two kids living in NY) and it's described as a comedy. I can't say I laugh much. But I do watch every week because it's unlike anything on television and it's usually fascinating. I just think of it as a drama about slices of real life. He's really willing to go to awkward places and use whatever story telling techniques work to get there.

Last week, the show was an hour long and was about a USO tour to Iraq and Afghanistan. In spite of the fact that it included a bit of how his daughters hid one of the class ducklings in his bag it felt very genuine. It turns out Louis has a blog, is an accomplished photographer and went to Iraq on a USO tour a couple of years ago. It's told in several parts and it's easily one of the best things I've read in a couple of months. It starts here, just follow the links at the bottom of each post to the next one (there are some other posts in between to go through). Really, this is great stuff.

USO Tour weblog. Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Allison Stanger on The Daily Show

Last night on The Daily Show, Allison Stanger was on to discuss her new book One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy. It was very good and serious enough that Stewart barely made jokes.

The Daily Show - Allison Stanger
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

A Look at the Iraq War Conflict and its Milestones

Nice Wall Street Journal infographic, A Look at the Iraq War Conflict and its Milestones. Puts the surge in some perspective. I wonder what the corresponding graph for other wars (in particular WWII and Vietnam) look like.

Infographic: Where Did the Money to Rebuild Iraq Go?

Good writes Infographic: Where Did the Money to Rebuild Iraq Go? "The Department of Defense is unable to account for the use of $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion it spent on reconstruction in Iraq."

Deficits of Mass Destruction

Chris Hayes in the The Nation calls it like it is. Deficits of Mass Destruction "Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just 'what everyone could agree on.' So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity—about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but 'you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.' So there you have it."

U.S. Soldier on 2007 Apache Attack: What I Saw

Wired has an interview with a U.S. Soldier on 2007 Apache Attack: What I Saw. A good read, though disturbing at times. He described what he saw when he came upon the scene then they talked a bit about the release of the video.

"Wired.com: Wikileaks presented the incident as though there was no engagement from insurgents. But you guys did have a firefight a couple of blocks away. Was it reasonable for the Apache soldiers to think that maybe the people they attacked were part of that insurgent firefight?

McCord: I doubt that they were a part of that firefight. However, when I did come up on the scene, there was an RPG as well as AK-47s there…. You just don’t walk around with an RPG in Iraq, especially three blocks away from a firefight…. Personally, I believe the first attack on the group standing by the wall was appropriate, was warranted by the rules of engagement. They did have weapons there. However, I don’t feel that the attack on the [rescue] van was necessary.

Now, as far as rules of engagement, [Iraqis] are not supposed to pick up the wounded. But they could have been easily deterred from doing what they were doing by just firing simply a few warning shots in the direction…. Instead, the Apaches decided to completely obliterate everybody in the van. That’s the hard part to swallow."


"McCord: When it was first released I don’t think it was done in the best manner that it could have been. They were stating that these people had no weapons whatsoever, that they were just carrying cameras. In the video, you can clearly see that they did have weapons … to the trained eye. You can make out in the video [someone] carrying an AK-47, swinging it down by his legs….

And as far as the way that the soldiers are speaking in the video, which is pretty callous and joking about what’s happened … that’s a coping mechanism. I’m guilty of it, too, myself. You joke about the situations and what’s happened to push away your true feelings of the matter."

Wikileaks Video of US Military Killing Journalists

Boing Boing has a page including the video of the Wikileaks video of US military killing journalists. Everything about this story is bad. The Boing Boing page lists most of them, the event, the coverup, the news coverage afterwards. Ugh.

Photo Essay: The Real Hurt Locker

Foreign Policy has an interesting Photo Essay: The Real Hurt Locker "A look at the actual people behind the controversial Oscar-winning film." I'm not sure what's so controversial about the film, but the photos are amazing.

The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009

Foreign Policy's list of The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009.