Drowning Government In A Bathtub Of Red Ink

Glory be! Heavens to Betsy! Who’da thunk it? President George W. “Ali Baba” Bush and his forty thieves have just been the first Republican administration to balance a national budget in more than a half-century of cutting taxes and carving up the spoils at the Washington Buffet. But wait a minute. Maybe it was just practice before they get to the U.S. economy. You see, it was the “sovereign” Iraqi government which has come up with a huge budget surplus!
Let’s see if I have this right. U.S. taxpayers are now paying $720 million a day (counting deferred costs such as interest and debt and long-term care of the wounded), and $16 billion (minus interest and wounded care) a month to fight the two wars and rebuild Iraqi and Afghan infrastructure while Iraqis are piling up a surplus with their oil money.
There is so much thievery in Afghanistan among the warlords, the drug lords, and the Afghan government that not even congressional or Al Capone’s accountants could keep track of our money. And that is not even counting the millions that are being siphoned off to Swiss banks by leaders of the Iraqi and Afghan governments.

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, has calculated the cost of four years of the Iraq War at $3 trillion.
It was only five years ago that the great World Banker Paul Wolfowitz told Congress the Iraqis would pay for the war with revenue from their oil fields because “Iraq is swimming in a sea of oil.” The costs for the Iraq War are now totaling around $700 billion and climbing rapidly.
The most incompetent administration in history has been wrong since the beginning. I remember when Andrew Natsios, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Ted Koppel on Nightline that it would cost only $1.7 billion to reconstruct Iraq after “shock and awe.” This is the only time I have seen Koppel speechless.
White House Economic Advisor Lawrence Lindsey estimated it would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion right after that program. Poor Lawrence was promptly fired after “the greatest secretary of defense in history” Don Rumsfeld said “baloney” to his estimate. Rumsfeld thought the “six-week war at the most” would cost $50 billion to $60 billion. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s assistant, amended that to “Iraq’s oil would pay for the damages.”

That was about five years ago. It appears the Lurch administration has come up with a new Biblical proverb: “Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.”

Flashing Forward

U. S. Comptroller General David Walker told Congress last week that “the Iraqis have a budget surplus while we have a huge budget deficit…One of the questions is who should be paying.” His auditors also told Congress that “Iraq isn’t spending much of its own money despite soaring revenue (Before the war oil was $11 a barrel. Yesterday it was over $109 a barrel.) Oil revenues are pushing the country toward a huge surplus.” They added that the lack of spending “is due primarily to Baghdad’s inability to determine where its money is needed most and how to allocate efficiently.” Our ever-alert Congress is thinking of investigating!

An article in the March 17, 2008 issue of U.S. News & World Report points out why Lurch’s surge has no hope of working. Why should the Iraqis spend “their” money when we are so willing to spend ours repairing the stuff that doesn’t work or what we have blown up? We buy materials and pay off contractors while the members of the Iraqi government are wiring their oil money to Swiss and Cayman Island bank accounts.
General James Milano of the 4th Infantry Division has the job of overseeing the restoration of essential services in Baghdad—electricity, water, hospitals, sewers.

He used the Abu Ghraib Hospital as an example of how difficult it is to work in a climate of “baksheesh” (bribes) and other corruption. There are many eye injuries due to roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. Through our reconstruction funds we bought a stereoscopic lens about five years ago to enable doctors to perform eye surgeries. The device has been sitting in a storage room for five years. The Iraqis have been trying to supply a mount for five years so it can be put to use. General Milano is honest with an eye doctor: “The sad thing about this is that we’re five years into war and the reconstruction, and this hospital is still back at ground zero. If only it was just in Abu Ghraib.”

Is This A Train Coming at Me in This Dark Tunnel?

Milano, with a degree in chemical engineering, has been commander of a Baghdad that often breaks out into open warfare at inopportune times. He summed up the U.S. position on reconstruction after five years of struggle: “We don’t need any more of this ‘turned the corner’ stuff. To say we’ve got a lot of hard work to do here barely covers it. If we don’t get the essential services done this year, I don’t know when we will ever be able to do it. The infrastructure is degrading, the people have little faith that the central government can deliver, and the security window could easily close.”

With a summer of 120-degree days coming soon for both troops and residents, Milano tries to get out of his office to inspect what work is going on. But if he wants to check on water plant or sewage-lifting station construction, first he must consider his own security. In order to survive an inspection tour, he is guarded by dozens of soldiers riding in a dozen armored humvees.
Four million Baghdad residents depend on just one reservoir for their drinking water. But only two of twelve pumps are working because of lack of electricity and parts. Only one generator works. Three new filtration units necessary for treating the water sit in the parking lot—useless—because the men who had the contract from Jordan to deliver the units stole the filters and they cannot be found!

Sanitation in Baghdad is way below pre-war standards. U. S. troops installed new yellow dumpsters in key locations around Baghdad. As soon as they are full the Iraqis dump them over into the streets so their goats can feed on the garbage!

To add to the misery in the cities, the Sunnis and the Shiites often play sewer war by turning up the sewer-lifting pumps to full power so the increased pressures break all the sewer pipes.

You will never guess who the Iraqi government representative to General Milano is. Does the name Ahmed Chalabi ring a bell? He was the Iraqi “dissident” who convinced Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, and that ilk that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and was ripe for “regime change.” At that time Chalabi had not been in Iraq for thirty years and was facing a 20-year sentence for bank fraud in Jordan. Cheney and Chalabi deserve each other.

The Second Green Zone for The Insurgents

How are the Iraqis building up such a budget surplus while our economy is going in the tank? There is one spot in Iraq that has never been bombed. It is the Hamrin oil refinery at Baiji, Iraq in Sunni-dominated territory. The commander of our forces at the refinery, Captain Joe Da Silva, gives the reason: “It’s the money pit for the insurgency.” Richard Oppel in the March 16 issue of the New York Times relates an amazing story of smuggling, payoffs, black market, highjacking, bribes, forged papers and invoices, and manipulated meters and gauges.
I have always had the impression that the Lurch administration and much of our military have the idea that Arabs are simple camel drivers who can be manipulated by smarter Europeans. They have not survived for 5,000 years because they are dumb. Over 100 Iraqis are killed by insurgents each week and experts feel that much of the money used for the kills comes from the refinery.

Oppel says at least 91,000 Iraqis are being paid high salaries by American forces to serve in neighborhood militias in the region of the refinery. Why is the American taxpayer paying these salaries when the Iraqi government is running huge surpluses? One can only conclude we lack intelligence—the brain kind.
  In addition to the smuggling and skimming taking place at the refinery, insurgents add to their money supply by kidnapping wealthy Shiites and selling “protection” like the Mafia to businesses in the area.

  Before our invasion there were eight gas stations in the town of Sharqat 50 miles north of the refinery. Now there are 50. The stations are there so they have access to the Iraqi black market for gas and oil. Stations cost about $100,000 to build but just the loads of seven tanker trucks can be sold on the black market for well over that amount. In 2007 the Pentagon estimated that over $2 BILLION in fuels went into the black market, most of the money then collected by insurgents. A tanker truck full of kerosene sells for $35,000 on the black market. You can only conclude from the oil smuggling business in Iraq that the Republicans do not give a damn how much taxpayer money is spent in Iraq as long as it doesn’t come out of their personal account.

  Evidently the Republicans have swallowed the line of Grover Norquist, the American for Tax Reform guy and Republican guru, who came up with this memorable line: “My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” Our present economy testifies to the fact that they are doing it. If we keep the Republicans in office we will soon be spending all of our money on interest, the two wars we are losing, and the military-industrial complex now building billion-dollar fighter planes we have no need for.