What Senator George McGovern Got Right

Listen to my interview of Senator George McGovern four and a half years ago HERE.

Six years ago, I wrote the following about McGovern’s plan to end the then-extremely-deadly war on Iraq:

Former Senator George McGovern has co-authored a book with William Polk titled “Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now.” This book does one of the better jobs I’ve seen of explaining the historical context of the disaster we’ve created in Iraq. But, more importantly, it proposes a way out, including specific steps, noting that some of them will cost money and estimating how much. McGovern and Polk propose that we pay:

• $6 billion for a two-year, Muslim, international force;
• $1 billion to help Iraq create, train, and equip a police force, not an army;
• $0.5 billion to help create and train a national reconstruction corps, made up of Iraqis;
• $0.25 billion to survey and plan the removal of landmines, unexploded ordinance, and depleted uranium;
• $1 billion for surveys, planning, and organization of rebuilding damaged property (plus loans and grants of an unspecified amount to assist Iraqis in rebuilding);
• $0.5 billion to dismantle and dispose of blast walls, wire barriers, and other architecture of war and occupation;
• $0.25 billion to restore archeological sites;
• $0.1 billion to audit the Coalition Provisional Authority and find out where oil profits meant for the Iraqi people went;
• $0.00001 billion in reparations for each civilian killed or grievously wounded (plus an unspecified amount for victims of torture) [following the authors’ calculation, but using the Lancet study’s much higher estimate of deaths, this comes to $9.75 billion];
• $0.5 billion in fellowships to train lawyers, judges, journalists, social workers;
• $0.5 billion to bring professionals who emigrated back to work in Iraq;
• $1.7 billion to rebuild Iraq’s public health system.

This adds up to $22.05 billion. That’s the cost of twelve and a half weeks of occupying Iraq. And if we spend that $22.05 billion, we’ll still have $47.95 billion left, money that has already been approved by Congress to pay for the war and put our grandchildren into debt. It will not cost $47.95 billion to put all of our troops on planes and bring them all home by June 2007, as McGovern and Polk propose. It will cost $3.8 billion according to a proposal from John Isaacs.

The rest of the money ($44.15 billion), plus the $160 billion that we now won’t need for war at all (bringing the total to $204.15 billion), I’d propose, should be spent on the following priorities:

• Physical and psychiatric care and career counseling for veterans ($1 billion);
• Restoration of people’s homes that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina ($10 billion)
• Creation of universal, single-payer health care (Sen. Wyden has a new quasi-single-payer plan with costs covered by shifting current expenses);
• Restoring a decent minimum wage (no cost);
• Establishment of free college tuition for all ($60 billion per year by Rep. Kucinich’s estimate);
• Creation of a cabinet-level Department of Peace (2% of “Defense” budget = $8 billion).

Of course, we’re still left with $125.15 billion, so we may just have to take a drastic step – and I know how unpopular this is: we may just have to CUT TAXES. Just for kicks we could change it up this time and cut taxes on working people rather than the rich. I bet voters would just hate that!