War and taxes

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Writing anything coherent about the war takes time and energy and requires focusing on things I don't want to think about, so I've been shying away from it.

But here are some assorted political items I've picked up in the past few days:

An article ("Choosing Sides") about the division in Congress between those who support Powell's pro-UN ideas about post-war Iraq reconstruction and those who support Rumsfeld's US-in-charge plans. The most interesting bit to me was this line:

"Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes," says House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Nothing?

Lessee. Then there's this from a UPI article:

U.S. forces have still not discovered definitive evidence of Saddam's [WMD] program, one of the primary reasons for the entering the war.

[U.S. Central Command spokesman Brig. Gen. Vincent] Brooks said further examination of a possible chemical weapons operations site discovered by special operations forces in Mudaysis has turned up less than was initially thought.

"We think that there may have been an explanation for this as an NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) training school, not an operational facility....," Brooks said. "We don't have any further investigation we're going to do on that site. And so our conclusion at this point is that was not a WMD ... site per se. In this case, it proves to be something far less than that. It doesn't mean they're not out there."

I continue to be bemused by the near-universal belief among Americans that Iraq has WMDs. Maybe they do and maybe they don't; what surprises me is the very common statement (I've seen variations on this dozens of times in the past month or two) "I don't have any evidence for this, but I know they have them." This belief seems to be rooted in the knowledge that S.H. is a bad and untrustworthy man, and the lack of support given to the inspectors. Of course, there are plenty of things that I believe without evidence as well; I guess I just find it interesting that this particular belief is so common. It's not that I don't think it's plausible; it's that I'm surprised by how certain everyone sounds about it.

Ironically, I think it will be much better for the U.S. in the long run if Iraq does have WMDs, because it'll retroactively justify (in the eyes of the international community) our having started this war. If it turns out they don't, the international view of the U.S. is going to sink even lower than it's already sunk. (Although perhaps the belief that the weapons exist will persist even if none are ever found.) I find myself in the awkward-for-me position of more or less hoping that Bush et alia were right about various things, 'cause that's the best outcome I can see right now. Of course, if their being right leads them to move on to wiping out Syria, Iran, North Korea, et alia, then perhaps it's not the best possible outcome. From my point of view.

I, of course, have no way of knowing whether Iraq has WMDs; it wouldn't especially surprise me if they do. But so far I haven't heard of any credible evidence that they do, so it also wouldn't especially surprise me if they don't. All the arguments I've seen about this seem to me to be based on personal belief systems and gut feelings.

(And I suspect that those paragraphs will result in a flurry of political comments and arguments in the comments section, and so I request that the comments section be kept civil. If anyone posts anything that I judge to be inflammatory or derogatory in the comments section, even in response to something inflammatory I've posted in an entry, I'll probably delete it. Discussion is fine; flames, snide nastiness, and vitriol are not. So please play nice.)

Moving right along, we have yet another answer to my question about why the US hasn't shut down official Iraqi broadcasting (from a CNN article):

"It has a very redundant system," said Maj. General Stanley McChrystal, when asked at a Pentagon briefing why coalition forces have not succeeded in shutting down the television signal in Iraq. He said the television signal emanates both from fixed sites and mobile vans.

Which certainly makes sense. That page also contains a link to an interesting slide-show-plus-audio-track titled "Misunderstanding in Najaf," about soldiers dealing with an Iraqi crowd outside a mosque; it sounds like there are some sensible people on the ground there, and at least some degree of cultural sensitivity. Good to see.

On a lighter note, not connected to Iraq, Josh provided a link to Kim Jong Il's LiveJournal. Mostly entertaining for the Kim Jong Il/GWB slash IM dialogues.

Okay, back to the war:

Interesting piece in the Bangkok Post ("Don't believe everything you hear from 'experts'") suggests that the war is proceeding pretty much as expected, and that people are overreacting to small changes in direction. I would argue (as Nick has been demonstrating) that official sources of information have been awfully contradictory, and that there have been a lot of different predictions made by people in power about how things will go that haven't really been borne out (though I do remember seeing articles on the first day of the war in which Bush attempted to caution the American people that the war might not be easy or brief). But I think the overall point is an interesting one: two weeks into a war may be a little too early to suggest that it's another Vietnam.

(Speaking of predictions, remember the statements that we wouldn't rest until Saddam was removed and we had "nothing less than complete and final victory" (as Bush apparently put it on Thursday)? That may not be the plan any longer as of Friday; Doug points to an article about the new concept of rolling victory, in which we decide to be satisfied with "[controlling] significant territory and [having] eliminated a critical mass of Iraqi resistance." Interesting.)

Meanwhile, on the home front, Doug notes that there'll be a protest to protect libraries in Portland next Saturday. Le Guin, Eileen Gunn, L. Timmel Duchamp, et alia will be there. For those not in Portland, it's still worth following the link to see the entertainingly snide illustration.

Finally, the really hard item, and the one I'm most trying to avoid thinking about: taxes. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee has a graphic that says "If you work for peace, stop paying for war." I'm struggling with that; on the one hand, I support a lot of things that the US government does (maintaining interstate highways, regulating labeling of products, etc), and I would feel kinda hypocritical trying to avoid paying taxes while believing that it's a good thing for the government to spend money on various things. And yet, I can't deny that the money I pay for taxes also goes (and will go even more in the future) to build weapons and support killing people. I'm unhappy and uncomfortable about that. But enough to actually refuse to pay taxes? Not at this point. But I'm not sure that continuing to pay taxes is consistent with my ethical system.

I'm probably going to get a refund this year, as I do every year, so I've actually already paid the taxes that the government wants me to pay. And I'm going to get even more of a refund by filing adjusted returns from the past two years now that SH donations are tax-deductible. But that just sidesteps the ethical question. I don't have a good answer at this point.

. . . On an only tangentially related note, I don't think I can imagine what it would be like to have a war in my home city. Okay, so I live in the suburbs, but imagining, say, a war in San Francisco—it's just too far from my experience. I hope I never have to find out what it's like first-hand, even as I know that many people don't have that luxury.

6 Responses to “War and taxes”

  1. Josh

    About “the near-universal belief among Americans that Iraq has WMDs”: I don’t know if this is why most Americans believe it, but the Administration’s argument is that we know they had them, and they can’t tell us what they did with them, so even if we don’t see them any more, we assume that they still have them.

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  2. Wendy

    Neat set of links, Jed. I really did like the cartoon that went with the Portland library article.

    I’m also quite puzzled on the subject of WMD’s. I’ve tended to fall on the side of believing that Iraq has them, for two main reasons:
    1. Iraq admitted to having large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the end of the first Gulf war, and never really explained what became of much of that stuff. (See this article for some numbers on biological toxins.)
    2. It’s not terribly difficult to hide the production facilities for these kinds of things. They don’t need to be huge, and from the outside, there’s not much to distinguish them from legitimate chemical plants or microbiological research facilities.

    On the other hand, I get the distinct impression (I can’t have pretended to have studied this as closely as the subject really warrants) that the evidence presented by the Administration for current WMD possession by Iraq has been really lame. There are two possible explanations for this. One, that they have the info, but can’t reveal it without compromising intelligence sources in Iraq. Two, that they don’t actually have any info.

    I’d be a lot more willing to accept the first explanation if I considered the current administration to be at all trustworthy.

    There are days when I can’t wait for this war to be over, not just because it’s a terrible thing, but because once it’s over, we can start to figure out what the heck actually happened.

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  3. Vardibidian

    Lots of interesting stuff here, but I wanted to address the tax issue. As you can imagine, it’s a thing Gandhi writes about in some detail, and he comes down pretty strongly against withholding taxes, except in extreme circumstances, after Satyagraha has already been in effect, and even then it should (in his eyes) be limited to a few high-profile people who will make a personal sacrifice, go to prison, and have their possessions confiscated in order that their suffering might open the eyes of the government. That’s his conclusion as I understand it, feel free to reject it (as I do).

    My own thought is that withholding taxes is a withdrawal from society, and that it’s a sloppy idea to do that without actually withdrawing, either by emigrating or by going to prison. I don’t think that it’s particularly persuasive as a rhetorical tactic, unless the amount you would be paying in tax gets donated to all of the things that the government funds that you agree with, which is difficult. Still, it’s a dissociation, and as such isn’t likely to convince members of the group from which you are dissociating yourself from.

    Finally, I should add (and it’s not a new idea) that no man is an island unto himself, and that as a consequence, no-one gets to have clean hands. Whether you pay taxes or not. I do my best, and make my own decisions, and live with them, but also have to live with the decisions of the electorate and the elected government. I don’t get to make decisions for other people, and that (as far as I can see) includes what is done with my taxes – except to the extent that I vote, convince others to vote the way I think is right, run for office myself or convince other people I trust and agree with to run, or convince office-holders of the rightness of my opinion in various ways.

    Just my reaction, of course.

    Thank you,
    -Vardibidian.

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  4. Anonymous

    Yes–not paying taxes is essentially withdrawing from democracy. The opinions of the majority, and the actions of those whom the majority elects to represent us, may not always agree with our own opinions, but we know the rules of the game, and unless we emigrate we are agreeing to the rules of the game. (Yes, I know GWB wasn’t elected; but the Supreme Court deciding whether the vote recount goes forth is part of the rules too, unfortunately.) If you don’t like the rules, work to change the rules; if you think going outside the rules is justified, suggest a better system than representative democracy.

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  5. Jed

    WMDs: In a widely-quoted CNN interview, former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter said that chemical weapons have a shelf life of five years, and biological weapons have a shelf life of three years. But another online source suggests that this was a major about-face for Ritter (he’d apparently claimed previously that it was a near-certainty that Iraq had such weapons); and other sources indicate that if the chemical weapons are kept in “binary” form (two separate chemicals, combined to make the weapon chemical shortly before use), they have a much longer shelf life. So it’s honestly unclear to me whether it’s plausible for chemical and biological weapons that Iraq had in 1991 to still be viable now, if you assume (for the sake of argument) that they haven’t made any new ones. Pointers to more data welcome.

    Taxes: Thanks, Vardibidian and Anonymous; interesting food for thought. I tend to agree that isolation isn’t the answer and isn’t even necessarily very effective; on the other hand, exerting mass economic pressure of various kinds in various situations can sometimes work.

    Also: for most things I’m willing to go along with Vardibidian’s involvement-in-democracy approach (if you haven’t read the earlier installments of V’s discussion, just ignore the “Conservative Tenet” part); I’ll pay taxes even when (as is usually the case) I object to stuff the administration is doing. But a line in the last paragraph of that entry (“Unless, of course, it’s a moral matter, and I’m willing to go to jail over it. Or I emigrate”) may be relevant in this particular case: I’m contributing money to an organization that’s killing people, and that becomes, to me, a moral matter.

    But I’m probably being naive to think this is an unusual circumstance. The US gov’t contributes to deaths all the time; perhaps the answer really is to work to change the system from within. I do tend to figure that both internal pressure and external pressure are useful in effecting change.

    Anyway, thanks for the thoughts.

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  6. metasilk

    Back to WMD: I’ve heard it suggested that if the US doesn’t find them, we would likely plant some to be found.

    Plausible? Sure. Probable? Hmmm.

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