Commentaries

U.S. can’t return to GOP policies

Karl Rove scorned President Obama's speech announcing the removal of combat troops from Iraq as a "Come home, America" speech.

For Rove, this is an insult, not a compliment. He and a gaggle of former Bush administration officials have flooded the airwaves, demanding that Bush be given "credit" for the "success" in Iraq, and assailing Obama for saying it is time to "turn the page" and focus on rebuilding America.

Will they never learn? Rove condemns Obama for suggesting that we squandered a trillion dollars to no good effect in Iraq. Actually, the amount squandered on these wars is over $3 trillion, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has detailed.

Rove and his ilk insist that the U.S. can police the world and maintain a strong economy.

He argues the money spent in Iraq is a better investment than Obama's recovery plan, which staved off a depression, employed, as many as 3 million people, according to the independent Congressional Budget Office, and made a down payment on our necessary move towards renewable energy.

Republican leaders would return to the policies of Bush: more tax cuts, more deregulation, more cuts in domestic investment, more wars abroad and more military spending. Yet it is those very policies that drove the economy off the cliff and left us in a very deep hole.

More than 4,000 Americans have lost their lives in Iraq; 30,000 were wounded, hundreds of thousands return scarred from their sacrifice. Millions of Iraqis are refugees. More than 100,000 were killed and the carnage continues. We successfully removed a brutal dictator, but we sparked a continuing civil war, ironically increasing Iran's power and influence dramatically.

At the same time, we've shortchanged our society here at home. Last week, many commuter trains into New York City were shut down after an 80-year-old switching station shorted out. This is typical of a decrepit infrastructure -- in everything from sewers to bridges -- that the Association of Civil Engineers estimates would take $3 trillion simply to repair.

We shudder at the reports of bombs going off in Iraq, killing innocent civilians. But there is more violence here at home than in Iraq: 30,000 Americans are killed by gun violence each year and 100,000 more are injured.

We've lost one of three manufacturing jobs over the last year.

Our cities are in dire straits. In Detroit, once the showcase of America's industrial might, there are 90,000 vacant lots and boarded up homes, and 150,000 are unemployed. Poverty is rising; desperation follows.

Our economy is in trouble. Under Bush, we were borrowing $2 billion a day, largely from Chinese and Japanese central bankers, to cover our trading deficits. Last quarter, soaring trade deficits knocked 3 to 4 percent off our economic growth.

Across the country, teachers are being laid off, schools are closing, after-school and pre-K programs are being shut down. Yet our students are already not receiving the education they need to succeed.

To win the "hearts and minds" of the people in Iraq and Afghanistan, we've spent more than $100 billion building schools, training teachers and police, modernizing roads and bridges and putting people to work.

At the same time, we're cutting back the money for reconstruction here at home, laying off teachers and police and putting off infrastructure projects.

Bush Republicans thought America could be strong from the outside in and the top down, by dispatching its troops and displaying its guns. In fact, strength comes only from the inside out and the bottom up, from making the investments vital to a competitive economy, from rebuilding our manufacturing base, from education our children, from the strength not of our guns but of our ideas.

Surely this is the lesson we must learn from the ruinous policies of the past decade. And a lesson we cannot forget as we dig ourselves out of the hole we are in.

"Come home, America?" That isn't an insult; it is an imperative.

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