There's nothing quite like the Bush administration's war spending to highlight the almost surreal malignancy within our government. I say almost, because unfortunately the malignancy is all too real. I just hope my passport is in order when the piper comes for his payment.
On occasion, however, the surreality blows by with tornadic force, as it did this morning upon reading this lede from the venerable Walter Pincus of the Washington Post: "The latest estimate of the growing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide battle against terrorism ... came last week from one of the Senate's leading proponents of a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq."
Think about that for a moment. Did the "latest estimate" of these whopping expenditures for which shoe clerks and housemaids are responsible come, say, from the guy who's actually spending all the money? Perhaps his Office of Management and Budget? Maybe, at least, the Congressional Budget Office?
No, they came casually delivered by a lone GOP senator in the course of speech on other spending.
In what Pincus labeled as "a little-noticed floor speech," there stood home-remodeler-extraordinaire Ted Stevens of the Appropriations defense subcommittee offhandedly mentioning to 300 million Christmas shoppers that their national credit card is taking on what the fiscally sane see as a bit too much ballast. "This cost of this war is approaching $15 billion a month, with the Army spending $4.2 billion of that every month," Stevens noted in strange approval, just as he was voicing support of "adding $70 billion to the omnibus fiscal 2008 spending legislation to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, as well as counterterrorism activities, for the six months from Oct. 1, 2007, through March 31 of next year."
Alas, that little omnibus bauble will cost a mere $11.7 billion a month, so for six more of them were $3.3 billion ahead. Congress just loves a bargain, especially at this time of the year, so it scooped it up -- no questions asked, no conditions attached. Better get it while it's hot; the savings may not last.
Meanwhile, over the span of fiscal year 2008 the Bush administration is "requesting" -- I like that; you know, like Tony Soprano would request -- "$189.3 billion for Defense Department operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and worldwide counterterrorism activities [hence the vague Stevens reference to the more exact $15.8 billion a month]." And this amount, whose appropriation we cautiously anticipate on a bed of pins and needles, happens to be the payoff for our splendiferous success in Iraq. Which is to say, it is "20 percent higher than for fiscal 2007 and 60 percent higher than for fiscal 2006."
It's success like that that makes failure such an appealing option.
The purported success, however, comes with some truly creative twists that help explain the creeping costs. To wit: "One relatively new cost is the $300 monthly payments to almost all Iraqis recruited as part of the 'Concerned Local Citizens' (CLC) program, which arms neighborhood groups to provide local security. The latest quarterly Iraq report by the Pentagon puts the program total at 69,000 people," of whom more than 80 percent are Sunnis, of whom a further 80 percent were likely shooting at us in 2006.
Hence on closer examination we see that Gen. David Petraeus' brilliance is reduced to bribery. No questions asked, no eyebrows raised, no fiscally sane inquiries into its advisability. If I, as a member of Congress or OMB functionary, proposed that we start paying 69,000 street-muggers $300 a month as an inducement for them to stop hitting little old ladies over the head, I'd be hooted and hollered out of Washington's professional circles as a McGovernite nitwit. Yet what's the difference?
But the Iraqi payments are actually more Nixonian. For Petraeus is merely skewing to the governing advice of that renowned political philosopher of Watergate fame, Chuck Colson, who once just as famously observed that "When you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."
Perhaps. As long as the Soprano protection money holds out, anyway. But is anyone in Washington, from the Bush administration on down, taking note that we simply can't afford this?
A Clinton OMB official commented that "Stevens is being realistic," which is both bizarrely and grotesquely accurate. "Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror are not getting cheaper," he warned.
Just as we're getting poorer. We save nothing, borrow everything, and act as though the piper will forever postpone his calling on his. We're drowning ourselves in a malignant, surreal reality.