Down the rathole of Iraq

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/05/ED8ARUVI9.DTL

Down the rathole of Iraq
Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

OK, THROW ANOTHER $50 billion down the rat hole that is the Iraq occupation. It's only money, if you ignore the lives being destroyed. That's what the White House is asking for, in addition to the $147 billion in supplementary funds already requested. Congress will grant the funding after Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker follow President Bush's photo-op in Iraq's Anbar province with a dog-and-pony show of their own. Meanwhile, the Democrats are totally cynical about this continuing waste of taxpayer dollars and of American and Iraqi lives, and wanting Bush to hang himself with his own rope, they will deny him nothing.

In the effort to retaliate against terrorists who hijacked planes six years ago with an arsenal of $3 knives, this year's overall defense budget has been pushed to $657 billion. We are now spending $3 billion a week in Iraq alone, occupying a country that had nothing to do with the tragedy that sparked this orgy of militarism. The waste is so enormous and irrelevant to our national security that a rational person might embrace the libertarian creed, if only for the sake of sanity. Clearly, the federal government no longer cares much about providing for health, education, hurricane reconstruction or even bridge safety, as the military budget now dwarfs all other discretionary spending, despite the lack of a sophisticated enemy in sight.

Numbers are boring, and the media acts as if there is no difference between a million and a billion dollars thrown at the military - let alone the trillion-dollar projected cost of the Iraq war. That last figure is well documented in a solid study out of Harvard co-authored by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz but ignored by the mass media. So too a recent authoritative report from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office that found, despite the $44.5 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars already poured into reconstruction, little detectable progress has been made in Iraq's crucial oil and electricity systems.

Remember when Paul Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's resident neo-con genius, assured Congress that Iraqi oil money would easily bear the entire cost of America's Iraqi adventure? Now the GAO tells us that, even after spending an additional $57 billion on the Iraqi oil and electricity infrastructure and assuming peace is restored, Iraq would still not produce enough oil and electricity to meet local demand until the year 2015. snip

The French and the Germans, hoary veterans of various failed European adventures in imperialism, warned us about precisely this outcome. While U.S. troops spill blood to guard broken oil pipelines, the Chinese and others go merrily about the world buying up black gold on the open market. But hey, don't worry about your tax dollars and the waste of lives - eat some freedom fries and learn, like our president, to keep smiling.

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1. there are no 'lessons learned'

.The French and the Germans, hoary veterans of various failed European adventures in imperialism, warned us about precisely this outcome. While U.S. troops spill blood to guard broken oil pipelines, the Chinese and others go merrily about the world buying up black gold on the open market. But hey, don't worry about your tax dollars and the waste of lives - eat some freedom fries and learn, like our president, to keep smiling.