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Why Is Bush Smiling?
By Robert Scheer
09/05/07 "TruthDig.com
" --- - 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, and
Congress will grant it 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 act 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, 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
neocon 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.
Aside from corruption and the lack of security, the biggest
problem in supplying Iraq with electricity is that the
national electrical grid has broken down, and different
factions, divided largely along ethnic and religious lines,
are grabbing what they can. This kind of anarchy is
emblematic of the new, emerging Iraq, in which the central
government has declining sway over the nation’s decisions.
That latter point was underscored this week by Bush’s
happy-faced visit to a highly fortified and isolated
American outpost in Anbar province. After posing gamely with
the troops at the Al-Asad base, Bush celebrated the return
of Sunni areas to the control of U.S.-armed
militias-composed largely of former insurgents who have at
least temporarily decided that their Shiite rivals,
currently in control of the central government, are a more
pressing enemy than the American occupiers. Speaking of one
such group of Sunnis trained by the Americans and dubbed the
“Volunteers” by their instructors, a U.S. soldier told The
Washington Post, “I think there is some risk of them being
Volunteers by day and terrorists by night.”
That is exactly what has occurred on the Shiite side, where
anti-U.S. religious groups have completely infiltrated the
American-trained Iraqi military and police forces. In Iraq’s
Shiite-controlled south, the domination of the military and
police by the fiercely anti-American Madhi Army and other
militias was ensured by the final withdrawal of British
troops from Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and a vital
center of oil production, on the same day that Bush visited
Iraq. Instead of the liberated, united and democratic Iraq
promised by this invasion, we are left with a nation ruled
by religious fiefdoms sustained far into the future by U.S.
taxpayers.
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.
Robert Scheer is editor of
TruthDig.com and a regular
columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.
© 2007 TruthDig.com
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