[NYTr] Bush's Deceitful Smiles

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Nation - Sep 5, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070910&s=scheer2


Bush's Deceitful Smiles

truthdig by Robert Scheer

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 dollars 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 US
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 US-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 US
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-US
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 US taxpayers.

The French and the Germans, hoary veterans of various failed European
adventures in imperialism, warned us about precisely this outcome.
While US 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.