We'll start with the Civil War. Congress enacted various income and excise taxes to meet the rising cost of the war, most of which were repealed in the years after the war.

During World War I, the 1916 Revenue Act and the War Revenue Act of 1917 increased tax revenue from $761 million in 1916 to $3.6 billion in 1918. After the war, in the 1920s, Congress cut taxes five times.

The same was true during World War II. Tax increases over several years raised revenues from $8.7 billion in 1941 to $45.2 billion in 1945. Again, tax cuts followed the war.

"Traditionally countries raise taxes to pay for wars, then cut taxes by a portion of the amount raised once peace descends," agreed J.D. Foster, senior fellow in the economics of fiscal policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

But Foster noted two caveats. One, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 came during a jobless recovery period after a recession. And the economic stimulus package championed by Obama includes $282 billion in tax cuts over two years -- also in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In fact, recent events suggest a move backwards as the entropy of the Arab and Muslim world reasserts itself. Sectarian violence is up. Little integration of Sunnis in the largely Shiite "national" military has occurred. Core questions of Sunni representation and central issues of territory - such as the Kurdish-Arab fight over Kirkuk - remain unresolved. Lawmakers who told the Americans they were past sectarianism are stoking it again:

Mr. Hashimi, a Sunni who told me not long ago that Iraq was now ready
for historic reconciliation, was widely accused of acting in a purely
sectarian way to ensure more votes for his bloc. The Parliament’s
Shiite and Kurdish blocs promptly joined forces in last week’s session
and, despite intense American lobbying, passed yet another election law
that would reduce Sunni seats even more.

Adopting legislation to knit the country together; reforming the
Constitution; strengthening independent security forces; reconciling
Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — all were benchmarks, and all remain
partly or wholly unmet, despite the security gains that were supposed
to create the space for political progress and thus peace. Instead, Iraqis treat their Constitution — like the benchmarks — the way they treat what few traffic lights operate here.

“So what?” a Kurdish lawmaker, Mahmoud Othman, said when asked about
the risk of holding the election later than the Constitution demands.
“Nothing in Iraq is very legitimate.”

Iran

Diplomacy is failing. We need to bomb Iran before they can build nukes!

Health Care

America has the best health care in the world!

"All right," said Karzai. "Let's do
it."

But he would change his mind at
least twice more during our sessions, and I would go into my song-and-dance and
change it back again.

In the course of our meetings, which were often interrupted
by unscheduled visits from aides and cabinet ministers and by many phone calls,
I developed a picture of Karzai the president, trying to reconcile it with my
memory of the genial spokesman I had met in Peshawar. It became clear that
President Karzai still had a lot in common with that young man -- an eagerness
to please, a dislike of conflict, a willingness to compromise, a need to find
consensus.  In this spirit he allowed mujahideen
warlords who had committed serious war crimes to join the government, while
most rank-and-file Afghans would have preferred to see them locked away in
Pol-i-charki prison. And while no one has yet accused him of being personally
corrupt, he has tolerated corruption all around him, and he tacitly allowed his
supporters to commit massive vote fraud in the August election.

Months after I left Kabul, and the book was ready for printing, Karzai waffled again and refused to allow publication. So I adapted the material I had gathered for a new book about
the Afghan leader and his troubled country.

At the start of his second term, Karzai is under immense
pressure from the new governments in Washington and London to grasp the nettle
and clean house. But since the day in December 2001 when he was named head
of the new post-Taliban government and had the support of the vast majority of
the Afghan people, he has shied away from the hard decisions that might have
set Afghanistan on a more promising course. I'm not sure if he has it in him to
do it now.

One compromise option put forward by the Pentagon, with the backing of Gates, would deploy an additional 30,000 to 35,000 U.S. troops -- fewer than McChrystal's optimal number to carry out his strategy -- and rely on NATO allies to make up the 5,000- to 10,000-troop difference. The third option, known by military planners as "the hybrid," would send 20,000 additional U.S. troops to shore up security in 10 to 12 major population areas. In the rest of the country, the military would adopt a counterterrorism strategy targeting forces allied with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, primarily in the north and east, with fighter jets, Predator drones and Special Operations troops that leave a light U.S. footprint on the ground. The military puts the annual cost of that option at $22 billion.

The most modest option calls for deploying an additional 10,000 to 15,000 troops. While under consideration at the White House, the proposal holds little merit for military planners because, after building bases to accommodate 10,000 or so additional soldiers and Marines, the marginal cost of adding troops beyond that figure would rise only slightly.