But I was a central player in the Afghan war — and if our delivery didn't make it to Kabul, the entire strategy of building up the Afghanistan army was going to fail. It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn't know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.
The details of the proposal:Dubbed the “Share the Sacrifice Act,” the six-page bill exempts anyone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan since the 2001 terrorist attacks as well as families who have lost an immediate relative in the fighting. But middle-class households earning between $30,000 and $150,000 would be asked to pay 1% on top of their tax liability today — a more sweeping approach than many Democrats have been willing to embrace.
I love this idea. It's always bothered me that while we engaged in an elective war in Iraq, Congress was cutting taxes and Bush was keeping cameras away from soldiers' caskets. The American public was shielded from the costs of the war, precluding any reasonable weighing of costs and benefits from taking place. A tax like this would at the very least make the financial costs of the war salient for everybody.
Bob Herbert had an excellent column yesterday about how Americans have seemingly put out of mind the gruesome reality of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Near the end, though, he makes a point that I've been thinking about lately:If we had a draft — or merely the threat of a draft — we would not be in Iraq or Afghanistan. But we don’t have a draft so it’s safe for most of the nation to be mindless about waging war. Other people’s children are going to the slaughter.My intuition is that there is a lot of truth to this. War has been decoupled from its awful costs: no one's child will be forced to die overseas, and no one has even paid any extra taxes to keep the war effort going. More than that: news about the wars isn't very prevalent in the press. And even when there is a story concerning the war, it is presented in a detached, sanitized manner, with graphic images and human grief left out of the story. Instead of melted bodies and panicked civilians running for cover we get video game stuff: military men making decisions, maps with arrows, footage of jets taking off.
