$500 billion and all I got was this lousy NIE-shirt

Yesterday’s excerpt from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq documented president Bush’s success at spreading terror. So how much has it cost us to make the country less safe at the same time as a gang of criminal deviants in Congress and the White House work to bury for once and all whatever claim to moral authority we may have had?

According to a Congressional Research Service report — unclassified and produced at taxpayer expense but officially unavailable to the public — the cost of “military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care” associated with Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terra® through the just-ended fiscal year 2006 is $437 billion. That figure is expected to top $500 billion either this week or early in the next session of Congress. CRS says 95% of the funds are apportioned between Iraq (75%) and Afghanistan (20%), with 1% going for medical care for veterans. The Iraq and Afghanistan figures include foreign aid to those countries, which accounts for about 8% of the funds appropriated for the wars there. And of course we know what happened to a big chunk of that 8%: it’s been lost to corruption, incompetence and steadily escalating violence.

That’s $500 billion and counting to “shape a new generation of terrorist leaders” and increase both the “number and geographic dispersion” of religious jihadists. And as BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer has shown on several occasions, the NIE assessments of the worsening terrorism problem are based wholly in reality.

That’s $500 billion appropriated to kill tens of thousands of completely innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq, to sacrifice thousands of US soldiers, and to justify obliviating not just the Constitution but the very concept of a decent society. We’re still a nation of laws, but the president gets to break the ones he doesn’t like and Congress gets to make ones enshrining torture, banana republic-like judicial proceedings and immunity from prosecution for US personnel and government officials who violate every standard of fairness and civilized behavior in the world they claim to be preserving.

It’s almost impossible to single out the most grotesque aspect of our various wars or the efforts to nullify the nearly 800 years of human rights evolved from the Magna Carta (via Atrios). If you had to pick one, though, it might be this. David Luban has a few choice words about one side effect of the torture bill: “And also goodbye, Nuremberg.”

A compromise left the international status of Nuremberg law ambiguous—the tribunal’s jurisdiction covered only the Axis countries, but nowhere does the charter suggest that the crimes it was trying were only crimes if committed by the Axis powers. Because of this ambiguity, the status of the Nuremberg principles as international law was not established until 1950, when the U.N. General Assembly proclaimed seven Nuremberg Principles to be international law. The American agenda had finally prevailed.

Well, forget all that as well. The Nuremberg Principles, like the entire body of international humanitarian law, will now have no purchase in the war-crimes law of the United States. Who cares whether they were our idea in the first place? Principle VI of the Nuremberg seven defines war crimes as “violations of the laws or customs of war, which include, but are not limited to … ill-treatment of prisoners of war.” Forget “customs of war”—that sounds like customary international law, which has no place in our courts anymore. Forget “ill-treatment”—it’s too vague. Take this one: Principle II, “The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.” Section 8(a)(2) sneers at responsibility under international law. Or Principle IV: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” Moral, shmoral. The question is, do you want the program or don’t you?

The Nuremberg trials presupposed something about the human conscience: that moral choice doesn’t take its cues solely from narrow legalisms and technicalities. The new detainee bill takes precisely the opposite stance: Technicality now triumphs over conscience, and even over common sense. The bill introduces the possibility for a new cottage industry: the jurisprudence of pain. It systematically distinguishes “severe pain”—the hallmark of torture—from (mere) “serious” pain—the hallmark of cruel and degrading treatment, usually thought to denote mistreatment short of torture. But then it defines serious physical pain as “bodily injury that involves … extreme physical pain.” To untutored ears, “extreme” sounds very similar to “severe”; indeed, it sounds even worse than “severe.” But in any case, it certainly sounds worse than “serious.” Administration lawyers can have a field day rating painful interrogation tactics on the Three Adjective Scale, leaving the rest of us to shake our heads at the essential lunacy of the enterprise.

One can see why the Bush administration would want to erase Nuremberg from our legal vocabulary.

Of course not all of the rest of us are shaking our heads at what Luban calls the essential lunacy. The press, for a collective one, are operating entirely inside the frame of that lunacy. This country is run at the moment by sadistic pigs — some of whom are, admittedly, most charming in person — who clearly get some kind of kick from the notion of torture and who cheerfully piss on the Constitution when it serves their political purposes or psychological needs.

In his Washington Post column today, David Ignatius says that Democrats are ducking the major question of what happens to Iraq should the US pull out. He’s right: they are. But it doesn’t matter. From inside the lunacy, any substantive plan Democrats offer between now and election day will fall victim to GOP attack ads; it simply isn’t possible to come up with a 30-second soundbite summarizing a plan for salvaging the greatest strategic blunder in modern American history. Looking in from the outside, it simply doesn’t matter what plan Democrats arrive at, if any, because George Bush is in power for two more years and nothing Democrats say or do is going to change what Bush says or does. And any plan Democrats concoct now will be mooted by whatever havoc Bush wreaks during his final quarter. (I emailed Ignatius yesterday questioning his thesis, but haven’t heard back yet.)

So screw the plan. If Democrats can get elected on the prospect of withdrawing from Iraq, more power to them. Their real job is to block the president and Congressional Republicans from finishing off the Constitution and gutting this country from the inside. That Ignatius and others continue to regard the situation we’re in as a more or less normal expression of political conflict is, more or less, insane.

$500 billion, and that’s just the immediately identifiable cost, and we’re nowhere near done. Insane.