Austin @ Large: Austin at Large

Today (Thursday), the City Council is set to vote on a resolution opposing unilateral U.S. action against Iraq. As I write, 63 U.S. cities have taken similar action. The list includes the hippie towns you might expect -- from Burlington to Boulder to Berkeley -- but also Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Cleveland, Oakland, Seattle, and Jersey City. And the District of Columbia.

Austin would be the first Texas city to defy the call for invasion and conquest, a point not lost on Council Member Daryl Slusher, who spearheaded today's resolution and is co-sponsoring the measure with Jackie Goodman and Raul Alvarez. In a statement released last week, Slusher notes that "since taking office in 1996, I have consistently avoided involving the council in national issues where we do not have direct authority or responsibility and where there is no clearly direct impact on Austin." Over the years, this sentiment has been evident on the City Council, setting Austin apart from those other hippie towns. In recent meetings, Burlington has weighed in against the USA PATRIOT Act, Boulder has taken a stand against genetic discrimination, and Berkeley has proclaimed that farm animals are "sentient beings" capable of pain and suffering.

But, as Slusher rightly notes, "a war would clearly have a direct impact on Austin both in human and financial terms." A war will have a direct impact on any city whose citizens pay taxes and serve in the armed forces, but that is not all. As you may have heard, Austin is bearing its $77 million share of what's become a nationwide fiscal meltdown throughout the public sector. The economy has caught a bad cold, but state and local governments have contracted pneumonia.

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Collateral Damage

This, in the view of some, is enough reason for the City Council to not trouble itself with foreign conflicts. "This is the kind of crap that we need to get after this council about!" wrote the Real Estate Council of Austin's Dominic Chavez in a broadcast e-mail, quoted in In Fact Daily, an online city politics newsletter. "They have a $77 million shortfall and absolutely no plan to create jobs or fix the local economy ... yet they have time to voice their opinions about a foreign-policy issue they have absolutely no control or purview over."

With all due respect to Mr. Chavez -- who speaks, I'm sure, for many, including (in less confrontational terms) Will Wynn -- this is exactly why it's important for Austin, and other cities, to take a stand against this ridiculous program of invasion and conquest. As horrifying as it is to think in these terms, the toll of a war will not only be felt among the poor and innocent of Iraq. It will also be felt among the poor and innocent of Austin and America.

Consider, again, those other cities that have found "time to voice their opinions." Philadelphia is $834 million in the red. Chicago had to close a $115 million gap at the end of last fiscal year. Baltimore is taking an across-the-board 3% emergency budget cut. And so on. Are all of these cities engaging in flights of fancy or distraction by standing against the invasion and conquest of a foreign country? Or do they realize that the health of their local economies is now held hostage by the caprices of the Bush administration and that their citizens will suffer the collateral damage?

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Written in Blood-Red Ink

Let me reassure you that the Bush White House has done its level best to make things worse for the cities. The invasion of Iraq will not boost the economy, create thousands of new jobs, reduce the cost of energy, make consumers more confident, or meet the needs for social services. The threat of war has already dragged down a nascent recovery, and the consequences are already being borne, for the most part, by local rather than federal government. Any sane "stimulus" package would highlight economic assistance to states and cities rather than fripperies like a dividend tax cut.

But the Bush budget is clearly not sane; in the proud GOP tradition, he proposes eye-popping deficits in the name of small government. His budget includes yet more promises of federal funding to cities and towns to defray locally borne costs for homeland security. The bill nationwide is already at least $2.6 billion, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors; Austin, you may remember, had to borrow against this year's tax collections to pay its homeland security bill. Yet neither the White House nor the GOP-controlled Congress have seen fit to deliver last year's promised aid, much to the dismay of local leaders across the country. Bush said nothing about it in his State of the Union address. A fraction of the effort spent by the White House to pursue (or manufacture) links between Saddam and al Qaeda could have gotten that money into the hands of cities like Austin. This will do as much to wage the war on terror as will be accomplished by the invasion and conquest of Iraq.

But at least they've promised to spend that money. Written in blood-red ink, the Bush budget sees fit to cut, almost to nothing, federal grants that support "traditional" public safety -- grants that Austin has relied upon heavily to boost its police force, without which the homeland security bill would be much higher and the city's looming gap much greater. Bush also underfunds the mandates of his No Child Left Behind Act, underfunds transportation (which creates a lot of jobs), underfunds housing. A budget floated on a $300 billion deficit should not need to underfund anything that needs funding, but Bush's does. It even, truth be told, underfunds defense -- the Bush budget contains not one cent to pay for the invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq.

By now, it should be clear that Bush's stated motives for waging war in Iraq are not his actual motives. If it were about the weapons, we would forget about Iraq and focus on North Korea. (Or our friends in Pakistan. Or the various dictators in former Soviet Central Asia. Or sub-Saharan Africa. Or -- most wisely -- all of the above.) If it were about terror, we would be invading Syria or Iran, not Iraq. If it were about Saddam Hussein, we have plenty of options before full-scale invasion, as a White House larded with the cast of Iran-Contra knows all too well. Bush does not want regime change or disarmament; he wants to conquer and colonize Iraq, for reasons that I don't think matter very much to most Americans. I think it well behooves any city in America to send the message that -- to borrow a line from Handsome Dick Cheney -- we have other priorities.