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The Pentagon recently asked nearly 10,000 soldiers to repay excessive bonuses they were given for re-enlisting in the California National Guard between 2007 and 2009 amid the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress was notified of the problem in 2014, but representatives failed to pass a provision that would allow the Defense Secretary to waive the repayments.
Some representatives claim that the California National Guard failed to convey the scale of the repayments issue or make it a congressional priority. An outraged and bipartisan group of legislators have called for quick action and full forgiveness of the overpayments (estimated to be around $70 million). On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and President Obama have promised to resolve the issue, even as officials acknowledge that the issue may extend to other states:
President Obama has told the Defense Department to expedite its review of nearly 10,000 California National Guard soldiers who have been ordered to repay enlistment bonuses improperly given a decade ago, but he is not backing growing calls for Congress to waive the debts, the White House said Tuesday. The comments by White House spokesman Josh Earnest suggest the administration is running into legal and policy roadblocks as it struggles to handle a public relations headache for the Pentagon, the National Guard and members of Congress who were caught off guard by the scope of the problem.
[...] California Guard officials say they informed California lawmakers about the scale of the debts in 2014, telling them in a list of legislative priorities sent to each House office and the House Armed Services Committee that "thousands of soldiers have inadvertently incurred debt, through no fault of their own because of faulty Army recruiting or accounting practices."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 28 2016, @01:59AM
Agreed that it's extremely unlikely to happen, but Congress could point out the concerted effort by the executive to manufacture evidence that the war was necessary. Meanwhile, the authorization act itself only authorized military action necessary to the defense of the U.S. By manufacturing evidence and falesly claiming Al-Qaeda ties, it's not hard to ake the case that Bush was not within the granted authorization.
But they haven't done that, have they? Similarly, there could be all sorts of protests from other countries at the official level, not merely public level that they were mislead with serious legal repercussions to follow. But for the most part, that's not happening either. My view is that the whole point of the exercise was to provide political cover to a host of politicians in the US and without who wanted to support invasion but needed something to sell to their constituents.
It's interesting to review the behavior of the core White House group once they realize during and after the invasion that Hussein didn't have a thing WMD-wise in March and April of 2003. For example, Paul Wolfowitz did a fair amount [defense.gov] of backpeddling once it became clear that WMD evidence would be hard to come by in Iraq.
Q: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into --
Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but -- hold on one second --
(Pause)
Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to --
Wolfowitz: -- there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. Sorry, hold on again.
That was on May 9, 2003. On January 23 prior to the invasion, Wolfowitz had this [cfr.org] to say:
As terrible as the attacks of September 11th were, however, we now know that the terrorists are plotting still more and greater catastrophes. We know they are seeking more terrible weapons-chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. In the hands of terrorists, what we often call weapons of mass destruction would more accurately be called weapons of mass terror. The threat posed by the connection between terrorist networks and states that possess these weapons of mass terror presents us with the danger of a catastrophe that could be orders of magnitude worse than September 11th. Iraq's weapons of mass terror and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are linked are not two separate themes - not two separate threats. They are part of the same threat. Disarming Iraq and the War on Terror are not merely related. Disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons and dismantling its nuclear weapons program is a crucial part of winning the War on Terror. Iraq has had 12 years now to disarm, as it agreed to do at the conclusion of the Gulf War. But, so far, it has treated disarmament like a game of hide and seek-or, as Secretary of State Powell has termed it, "rope-a-dope in the desert."
But this is not a game. It is deadly serious. We are dealing with a threat to the security of our nation and the world. At the same time, however, President Bush understands fully the risks and dangers of war and the President wants to do everything humanly possible to eliminate this threat by peaceful means. That is why the President called for the U.N. Security Council to pass what became Resolution 1441, giving Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations and, in so doing, to eliminate the danger that Iraq's weapons of mass terror could fall into the hands of terrorists. In making that proposal, President Bush understood perfectly well that compliance with that resolution would require a massive change of attitude and actions on the part of the Iraqi regime. But history proves that such a change is possible. Other nations have rid themselves of weapons of mass destruction cooperatively in ways that were possible to verify. So let's talk for a moment about what real disarmament looks like: There are several significant examples from the recent past-among them South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In South Africa, for example, President De Klerk decided in 1989 to end that country's nuclear weapons program and, in 1999 [1990], to dismantle all their existing weapons. South Africa joined the Nonproliferation Treaty in 1991 and later that year accepted full scope safeguards by the U.N.'s atomic energy agency. South Africa allowed U.N. inspectors complete access to both operating and defunct facilities, provided thousands of current and historical documents, and allowed detailed, unfettered discussions with personnel that had been involved in their nuclear program. By 1994, South Africa had provided verifiable evidence that its nuclear inventory was complete and its weapons program was dismantled. In the 1990s, President Kravchuk of Ukraine and President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation and START Treaties, committing their countries to give up the nuclear weapons and strategic delivery systems that they had inherited with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan and Ukraine both went even further in their disclosures and actions than was required by those treaties. Ukraine requested and received US assistance to destroy its Backfire bombers and air-launched cruise missiles. Kazakhstan asked the United States to remove more than 500 kg. of highly enriched uranium. Given the full cooperation of both governments, implementation of the disarmament was smooth. All nuclear warheads were returned to Russia by 1996, and all missile silos and heavy bombers were destroyed before the START deadline. Each of these cases was different but the end result was the same: the countries disarmed while disclosing their programs fully and voluntarily. In each case, high-level political commitment to disarmament was accompanied by the active participation of national institutions to carry out that process. In each case, the responsible countries created a transparent process in which decisions and actions could be verified and audited by the international community.
In Iraq's case, unfortunately, the situation is the opposite. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to choose a path of cooperative disarmament, one that he was obliged to take and agreed to take 12 years ago. We were under no illusions that the Baghdad regime had undergone the fundamental change of heart that underpinned the successes I just mentioned. Nevertheless, there is still the hope—if Saddam is faced with a serious enough threat that he would otherwise be disarmed forcibly and removed from power—there is still the hope that he might decide to adopt a fundamentally different course. But time is running out.
The United States entered this process hopeful that it could eliminate the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass terror without having to resort to force. And we've put more than just our hopes into this process. Last fall, the Security Council requested member states to give, quote, "full support," unquote, to U.N. inspectors.
Note that he claims before the invasion that Hussein's hiding of WMD is why the invasion is imminent, and Hussein can avoid this invasion by playing ball. Afterward, he claims that it was "bureaucracy" that they settled on one reason which turned out to be completely false, but they had two other good reasons for invading. Does sound to me like they were going to invade anyway, doesn't it?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday October 28 2016, @04:01AM
Bush was making oblique references to invasion before he was even elected. He said a number of things off hand that only made sense if invasion was a foregone conclusion (Honestly, I don't remember exact details but that was the impression I got at the time).
But yeah, as I said, it'll never happen. Too many people still in power would be dragged down with the administration, not to mention companies that are too big to fail.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 31 2016, @05:32AM
"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade...if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."
and
According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."
Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."