News n Notes from the Web

The Missing Meetings
Who did Jack Abramoff see at the White House?
By John Dickerson - Posted Thursday, Jan. 19, 2006, at 6:32 PM ET - Slate.com

The drizzle of the White House briefing was interrupted this week by a pointed exchange between NBC's David Gregory and spokesman Scott McClellan. Gregory repeatedly tried to get McClellan to talk about Jack Abramoff's meetings with Bush administration officials, and McClellan repeatedly did not. McClellan wouldn't say with whom the disgraced lobbyist met, what he was after, or what gift baskets he may have left behind. Had Karl Rove met with Abramoff, Gregory asked? "We don't ever tend to get into those staff-level meetings," McClellan said.

Potomac Fever has seized the Bush White House. That sickness, as defined by the Texans Bush brought with him to the White House in 2000, afflicts the self-important who stay in Washington too long. Sufferers forget that they work for The People and fall in love with the perks of their job. Clay Johnson, the head of White House personnel in the first term, set up a special Web site to inform White House aides about the symptoms associated with the disease. The site contains pictures of a limousine and a posh table setting as telltale signs of infection. Sufferers seeking a cure were encouraged to travel beyond the Beltway to talk to regular people, so that they'd remember who paid their salaries.

Jack Abramoff was the Typhoid Mary of Potomac Fever: He sucked up to people in power and showered them with gifts and favors in hopes that they would forget who they worked for and think they worked for him. Did White House aides succumb? McClellan's argument for not telling us is that staff in the executive branch should be allowed to deliberate without fear of disclosure. Staffers can't give honest advice if they're constantly worried about how the public might react to every meeting they might hold. The courts upheld the idea when they rejected attempts by both the General Accounting Office and private watchdog groups to sue for the records detailing which representatives of which oil, gas, and coal companies helped Dick Cheney write the administration's energy policy.

But like the government car, the "executive deliberation" perk can be abused. In this case, the White House isn't protecting its sensitive decision-making process; it's merely shielding itself from embarrassment. Congress may not have a legal right to demand records of meetings, but under the circumstances, Bush should voluntarily relinquish them to the public. Taxpayers may not have a right to sit in on every meeting and read every memo, but they should know whether Abramoff succeeded in putting his interests ahead of theirs inside the White House as well as Congress. The Bush campaign returned Abramoff's donations to help remove the stink. But it won't be able to fully fumigate until officials let us know who they met with and why.

Will it hurt the Bush administration politically to release the list? That depends who's on it. Democratic leaders are making increasingly extravagant claims about the "culture of corruption" in Republican Washington, and they'll pounce if Abramoff met with anyone more senior than the gardener. On the other hand, if there's nothing for Bush officials to hide, it will draw a pointed contrast between the integrity of the executive branch and the corruptibility of the legislative. Disclosure ultimately helped cleanse the White House during the Enron scandal, when it was revealed that Ken Lay called then-Commerce Secretary Don Evans for a favor and Evans did nothing.

Furthermore, have White House officials already forgotten the benefits of the inching candor they displayed at the end of last year when talking about Iraq? By admitting mistakes—up to a point—they began to rebuild the president's credibility enough so that people might listen when he made the more important case for finishing the job in Iraq. If he gives in on the tiny privilege of protecting staff meetings with a disgraced lobbyist, it might suggest that Bush doesn't apply his powers wantonly and without thinking. That message of calibration is what Bush is trying to sell on the far more important question of whether it was legal and right for him to spy without warrants. And indeed, Team Bush doesn't want to be still clutching the Abramoff meeting list while also defending against charges that the president abused his power by approving domestic eavesdropping.

Reporters aren't going to stop pressing McClellan for that list of Abramoff meetings. The questioning will continue as it has with the disclosures about who in the White House talked about Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. And we're likely to get the answer even faster with Abramoff than in the CIA leak case because, unlike reporters who fought to protect their sources, Abramoff and his partner Mike Scanlon are spilling the beans to investigators. Some of their older comments are talking for them, too. "Jack has a relationship with the president," Scanlon told a Florida newspaper in 2001. "He doesn't have a bat phone or anything, but if he wanted an appointment, he would have one."

Saying that you can get an appointment with the president, by the way, is another symptom of Potomac Fever.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.
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Iraq war costs could top $2 trillion
New study takes into account long-term costs of healthcare for wounded soldiers.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com - January 10, 2006

A new study by Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes concludes that the total costs of the Iraq war could top the $2 trillion mark. Reuters reports this total, which is far above the US administration's prewar projections, takes into account the long term healthcare costs for the 16,000 US soldiers injured in Iraq so far. "Even taking a conservative approach, we have been surprised at how large they are," the study said, referring to total war costs. "We can state, with some degree of confidence, that they exceed a trillion dollars."

The higher $2 trillion amount takes a 'moderate' approach. Both figures are based on the projection that US troops will remain in Iraq until 2010, with steadily decreasing numbers each year. The economists also used government data from past wars, and included such costs as the rise in the price of oil, a larger US deficit and greater global insecurity caused by the war, the loss to the economy from injured veterans who cannot contribute as productively as they would have done if not injured, and the increased costs of recruiting to replenish a military drained by repeated tours of duty in Iraq. These are items which are almost never included by the US government when determining the cost of the war.

Before the war started, Mitch Daniels, then the White House budget director, had said the war would be an "affordable endeavor" and rejected an estimate by the chief White House economic adviser that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion as "very, very high." The Office of Management and Budget "does not comment on this type of speculation," said spokesman Rich Walker. Reuters also reports that a Marine Corps spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Roseann Lynch, said Monday that the war is costing the US about $4.5 billion a month in military "operating costs," not including procurement of new weapons and equipment. Colonel Lynch said the war in Iraq had cost $173 billion to date. Stiglitz has been an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq. He was an adviser to President Bill Clinton and also served as chief economist at the World Bank. Bilmes was a former assistant secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration. The BBC reports that Stiglitz himself says that there will be some people who will dismiss his estimates as based on his opposition to the war.

The Boston Globe reports, however, that despite his view, Stiglitz is not considered to be outside the mainstream. "Stiglitz rants against globalization, and generally barks louder than he bites," said Timothy Kane, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. "That is, he is a champion to the lefties, but never really says that free trade is bad." Martin Wolf of the Financial Times writes that while its true that critics will dismiss the two Clinton-era economists work, that would be a mistake. In fact, Wolfe argues, the Stiglitz-Bilmes study ignores some other critical data. Among these are: costs borne by other countries, including those created by higher oil prices; costs consequent upon creating a link between Iraq and the jihadi movement that did not, on the evidence, previously exist; costs of increasing the income of some of the world’s least desirable regimes, above all, Iran’s; costs of throwing away the option to fight ground wars elsewhere or to fight in Iraq later on, under better conditions, better information and a better state of preparedness; costs of enraging many Muslims; costs to the effectiveness of the US military; costs of fragmenting the western alliance; the loss of Iraqi lives; the cost to US credibility of going to war on a false premise; and the cost to the US reputation of the torture scandals.

An editorial in the Brattleboro Reformer of Vermont argues that even if the Stiglitz-Bilmes estimates are exaggerated, it obvious that the war in Iraq is going to cost the American taxpayer far more than the Bush administration first said it would. Conservatives are already pooh-poohing these figures, and the Bush White House will not comment on them. But it is more than clear that even if a plan was put on the table right now for a phased withdrawal from Iraq over the next 12 months, Americans will still be paying the heavy human and economic costs of this war, the largest and most expensive military engagement since Vietnam. We can't undo the mistake of invading Iraq. But we can confront the cost of doing so and have a realistic plan for paying for it.
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