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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (4774)	9/15/2003 1:33:55 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 10965

It's Payback Time for the Bush Bash in Iraq by Gene Collier Published on Sunday, September 14, 2003 by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The cost is roughly $304 to you and $304 to your wife. Got two kids? That's another $608. Total family-of-four balance due: $1,216. Don't worry, no one will call. Congress will simply "appropriate" it, and $1,216 of good money that might have been spent on some flagging domestic program will chase some bad money into the thickening, sickening quagmire that is post-war Iraq. That's what $87 billion looks like in real-life dollars. You know, the $87 billion George Bush says he needs to have for the occupation of Iraq next year. If you split it like a dinner check, $87 billion divided 286 million ways, that's $304 from every man, woman and child in America. You hope it includes the tip. Actually, $304 from everybody would still leave the president $56 million short. Maybe the fellas on some of those championship teams he's always hosting at the White House could leave $56 million lying around, because I know those guys support Bush's policies. His tax cuts are aimed principally at the top 1 percent of wage earners, into which most of the jockocracy falls. Bush actually laughed off a suggestion that maybe, because the invoice for Iraq is so astronomical, a tax increase might even be called for. "You don't raise taxes during a recovery," he said at midweek. Uh-huh. Let us know when that recovery starts. Let us know when somebody gets a job. That same $87 billion no doubt assumes some level of cooperation on the part of the United Nations, the same body the Bush administration essentially told to go scratch itself last spring, when world opinion lined up against the very notion of invading Iraq. Despite what the great global oversimplifiers might think, the rest of the world isn't as stupid as they are. The international community knew that Bush's Iraqi designs were a boondoggle in the making. The U.S. shrugged in disdain at the U.N.'s reticence and triggered DestructionFest 2003 in March. Now, it must be admitted that the U.N.'s reservations were more than prudent and American suppositions wrong. Wrong on weapons of mass destruction, wrong on links to Al-Qaeda, wrong on every prediction on what Saddam Hussein might do when attacked, consistently wrong on his whereabouts, wrong on the ability of Iraq's oil production to overcome the cost of reconstruction and dead wrong on the number of troops necessary to maintain an occupation safely. Who but the United States, having bombed the daylights out of Iraq and killed anywhere from 6,000 to 37,000 of its civilians, would take a step back and conclude that it was anyone else's responsibility to fix things? Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, the Texas Republican, appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball," said exactly this. It's so amazing you might have to read it twice. "We've done the heavy lifting here. And I think it is time for the other people in the world who are affected by the destabilization of Iraq -- and the whole Middle East -- to step up to the plate. And secondly, I think it is important that we get the oil wells pumping and get the economy going in Iraq so that, hopefully, they will be able to pay for this out of their own economy." So our policy is: We'll bomb you, charge you to rebuild and scare your neighbors into contributing. Incredibly enough, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan was planning on putting together a meeting in Geneva this weekend to discuss a more robust U.N. role in Iraq, even after its Baghdad headquarters has been bombed, even after other permanent (veto carrying) members of the Security Council, France and Russia, have rejected the idea on its face. The United States distrusts Annan for alleged backstage lobbying against the invasion. Yet here he reacts charitably to the Bush predicament. Wrong about him, too. Congress has little choice but to give Bush what he wants in terms of funding. To do less would only further endanger the young men and women who do our actual "heavy lifting." We can't quit on Iraq the way we wobbled on Afghanistan, but maybe now Dubya knows why Poppy didn't go on to Baghdad in 1991. There wasn't anything terribly remarkable about the first President Bush, but he was Abraham Lincoln compared to this guy. Copyright ©1997-2003 PG Publishing Co., Inc. ### commondreams.org