Day: January 29, 2007

Most U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq Come from Rural Areas

Buck Banks

IED fodder: Due to local economic conditions, lack of educational and employment opportunities, and other pretty obvious reasons, most of the U.S. volunteer army comes from the hinterlands, not the cities. It’s not an uncommon story — young men and women from small towns getting their asses shot off while rich Republicans get richer off the spoils of war.

This might be considered part of a long-term White House strategy of fighting two significant wars abroad while demobilizing the population at home.

Demographer William O’Hare and journalist Bill Bishop, working with the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, which specializes in the overlooked rural areas of our country, have actually crunched the numbers in an important study that has gotten too little attention. Matching a data set from the Department of Defense listing the dead and their hometowns against information from the White House Office of Management and Budget on which counties in this country are metropolitan, they found that the American dead of the Iraq and Afghan Wars do indeed come disproportionately from rural America. Quite startlingly so.

According to their study, the death rate “for rural soldiers (24 per million adults aged 18 to 59) is 60 percent higher than the death rate for those soldiers from cities and suburbs (15 deaths per million).” Of rural areas, Vermont has the highest rate of casualties, followed by Delaware, South Dakota, and Arizona. Only eight of our states have higher urban than rural death rates.

Demographer O’Hare, who himself grew up in the small Michigan town of Flushing, tells Tomdispatch:

“We know that soldiers from rural America are dying at higher rates than those from urban America, strikingly higher, 60 percent higher. We know, from other research, that the rural young join the military at higher rates than those from metropolitan areas. The dearth of opportunity in rural areas simply leaves more young people there with fewer alternatives to the military.

“Dozens of case studies show that opportunities are moving away, part of a long-term shift. The opportunity differential between rural and urban America is probably higher now than at any time in the past. Our study highlights the price some young folks and their families are paying for lack of opportunity in rural America.”

What does this mean? Just over 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq. If the U.S. population is 300 million, then that’s just 0.001 percent of it. Add into this the fact that the American dead come disproportionately from the most forgotten, least attended to parts of our country, from places that often have lost their job bases; consider that many of them were under or unemployed as well as undereducated, that they generally come from struggling, low-income, low-skills areas. Given that we have an all-volunteer military (so that not even the threat of a draft touches other young Americans), you could certainly say that the President’s war in Iraq — and its harm — has been disproportionately felt. If you live in a rural area, you are simply far more likely to know a casualty of the war than in most major metropolitan areas of the country.

No wonder it’s been easy for so many Americans to ignore such a catastrophic war until relatively recently. This might, in a sense, be considered part of a long-term White House strategy, finally faltering, of essentially fighting two significant wars abroad while demobilizing the population at home. When, for instance, soon after the 9/11 attacks the President urged Americans to go to Disney World or, in December 2006, to go “shopping more” to help the economy, he meant it. We were to go on with our normal lives, untouched by his war.

Fleischer’s Testimony Contradicts Libby Claim, Bolsters Perjury Charge

Jon Ponder

Ari’s testimony at Scooter Libby’s perjury trial in the CIA Leak scandal certainly does not bode well for Scooter:

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer testified Monday that then-colleague I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby told him over lunch that the wife of a prominent war critic worked at the CIA.

Fleischer said the conversation happened June [sic] 7, 2003, days before Libby told investigators he was surprised to learn about the CIA operative from a reporter. That discrepancy is at the heart of Libby’s perjury and obstruction trial.

This and AP sources say Fleischer testified that his lunch with Libby was on June 7, 2003, but apparently the correct date was July 7. (Which Firedoglake confirms here.)

According to this Plame case timeline, NBC’s Tim Russert received a phone call from Libby on July 10 or 11, 2003, in which they discussed the network’s coverage of the purported Iraq-Niger uranium deal — but during which the subject of Amb. Joe Wilson and his wife, the secret agent, Valerie Plame, did not come up. However, Libby would later claim in testimony before a Grand Jury that he first learned about Plame’s identity from Russert during that call.

Guess Who’s Coming to the White House Press Club’s Dinner?

Trish

Remember last year when Stephen Colbert addressed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and ripped them a new one for their cowardice at reporting all things Bush?

Do we really need a neon sign to proclaim the coziness of the White House press corps and the White House’s occupant?

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions, he’s the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction.

Well, the press club isn’t going to make the mistake of having a relevant, funny, coherent speaker again this year. No, they’re opting for Rich Little instead.

Yes, I said it, ’70s-era impersonator Rich Little. Go ahead, check deadoralive.com if you don’t believe me but the guy is still breathing, and being dragged out of mothballs to deliver those wacky impressions that make the reporters and politicians laugh out loud. Or at least not squirm uncomfortably in their chairs.

While the name is probably unfamiliar to people under 40, Little was a popular Las Vegas performer and guest star on TV variety shows of the 1960s and 1970s. He’s best known for impressions of celebrities (Johnny Carson, Jimmy Stewart, Jack Benny) and presidents (Nixon and Reagan) who are no longer with us…

Which is why, according to Little, he was hired in the first place. “One of the reasons they picked me is because I’m not controversial,” he said yesterday from his home in Las Vegas. “They did get some flak about the guy they had last year. I don’t think they wanted someone political or controversial again.”

In light of this announcement I, for one, feel terrible about all the times I accused the mainstream media of turning away from the facts or weak-sister reporting.

Still, some people are talking about giving the new improved version of the dinner a miss. Like forever.

Another reason to scrap the dinner altogether, suggests Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review. After the Colbert controversy last year, and an earlier one in which Bush joked about not finding weapons of mass destruction, Rieder wrote that such press-politico events reflect the “smugness” and arrogance of the news media, suggesting that they are “part of a wealthy elite, completely out of touch with ordinary Americans.”

The hiring of “a controversy-free” Little underscores the point, he says: “Do we really need a neon sign to proclaim the coziness of the White House press corps and the White House’s occupant? It’s really hard for me to understand making a decision like this, particularly so close to the WMD debacle. The dinner must go.”

Clinton: Bush Must End War before He Leaves Office

Jon Ponder

Campaigning in Iowa over the weekend, Sen. Hillary Clinton issued a demand that Pres. Bush bring troops home from Iraq before he leaves office:

Clinton’s proposal provides an answer to the Republican talking-points challenge that Democrats don’t have a plan for getting out of Iraq. You want plan? Here’s a plan: You broke it, you fix it.

“This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy,” the Democratic senator from New York said her in initial presidential campaign swing through Iowa.

“We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office” in January 2009, the former first lady said.

This is smart because it pushes the responsibility for the war back onto the president, who has been trying to toss his hot potato to Democrats since they took control of Congress in November.

The proposal also provides an answer to the Republican talking-points challenge that Democrats don’t have a plan for getting out of Iraq. You want plan? Here’s a plan: You broke it, you fix it.

The senator’s challenge also reflects polling that shows that most Americans (52 percent in the most recent ABC/WaPo) want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, whether or not civil order is restored.

What Sen. Clinton’s proposal does not do is prevent U.S. forces from needlessly dying or being injured for two years while Bush dithers.