But in a very limited manner.
"You can't love what you can't keep," Sting notes ["(If You Love Somebody) Set Them Free"] and equally true is that you can't spend what you don't have.
So it was interesting to watch the meltdown, the economic crisis be treated as if it were a snowcone left out in the sun and that it would have no real impact on any other US spending.
When there is (limited) talk about potential impacts, it naturally goes to "now we may not get health care" or some other public works program while ignoring one of the largest drains on the US dollar, the Iraq War.
Last week, the House Budget Committee held a hearing on the budget surplus of the Iraq (puppet) government. John Spratt Jr. chaired the Tuesday hearing. The first panel was the committee exploring the costs of the illegal war with the Government Accountability Office's Joseph Christoff in response to the GAO's August report (click here for HTML and here for PDF)
of how the puppet government could end the year with a surplus as high as $79 billion and how this comes as a direct result of the (puppet) government refusing to spend on rebuilding and reconstruction.
And where was the media?
Was it only December of 2007 that Katrinkent vanden Heuvel was offering "VideoNation" (scary, we know) on the subject of "The Cost of War"? And didn't they return to that topic non-stop? In fact, the March 31, 2008 print edition offered this: "With the country poised on the precipice of a recession, if not already in one, the economy has eclipsed Iraq as the most pressing issue of the moment. But rather than being treated as discrete items on a laundry list of issues, the war and the economy should be linked. While the current economic meltdown has other causes, one of the biggest obstacles we face in pulling out of this crisis is the staggering cost of the war in Iraq" ("It's the War Economy, Stupid!"). Apparently stupid is The Nation which couldn't find time to cover the Tuesday hearing despite Katrina's insistence that it was time to "get real!" about the issues facing the country.
The Nation's far from the only one goofing off. Matthew Rothschild and his magazine The Progressive have jaw boned about the Iraq War repeatedly. In November of 2007, Amitabh Pal was exclaiming (in his best Beyond The Forest Bette Davis manner), "What a waste!
The Iraq War is going to cost the United States almost $3 trillion through 2017, assuming a modest level of 75,000 troops through that year, according to a new Congressional report." (Iraq War to Cost Trillions). April 24, 2008, Matty Rothschild was noting that figure again. Where was The Progressive last week?
And what of Democracy Now!, the most self-promoted 'grassroots' media collobaration in the country? The financial cost of the illegal war has long been a topic such as in February 2007 when Goody offered "Hidden Costs of War: Long-Term Price of Providing Veterans Medical Care Could Reach $660 Billion" and this year's segments have included "EXCLUSIVE-- The Three Trillion Dollar War: Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Economist Linda Bilmes on the True Cost of the US Invasion and Occupation of Iraq" and "Lawmakers Hold Tax Day Press Conference on Cost of Iraq War." So let's get this straight, a press conference is worth a segment but a Congressional committee hearing isn't?
In what world?
In a rare, once-in-a-blue-moon moments, all the Democrats serving on the committee were on the same page. Translation, if for no other reason than their efforts to pimp the Democratic Party, The Nation, The Progressive and Democracy Now! should have covered the hearing.
"This hearing will be the first opportunity for the Congress to receive testimony on this report, the GAO report, since the Government Accountability Office released it several weeks ago," declared committee chair Spratt at the start of the hearing. "GAO reports that Iraq is now running a substantial budget surplus -- it may reach $79 billion. At the same time the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] reported last week that in contrast to Iraq's growing surplus, the budget deficit for the United States. is expected to exceed $400 billion for the current fiscal year. That's the second largest deficit in our history. Even bigger deficits are projected next year."
Even without the news of the economic meltdown, the hearing should have garnered attention. In light of the meltdown, it should have received serious attention.
The hearing was a chance to review the economic report in plain, easy to understand lanaguage.
US House Rep Chet Edwards declared, "Given the GAO report, I guess I rank that administration prediction right up there with some of the predictions that we would be greeted as liberators, the war would be short-lived, it would cost the American tax payers less than a hundred billion dollars and we're turning the corner. We've turned so many corners in Iraq I think we're all dizzy from that. Every time we turn one corner we find another roadbloc down the way."
The predictions? The false promises. And Edwards wasn't alone in nothing those claims by the administration.
US House Rep Bob Etheridge brought up the false promises of the administration, " I think the thing that bothers me and I think a lot of folks who remember, you know the US tax payers have financed nearly $50 billion in Iraqi reconstruction in addition to all the other funds we've put in place and now we're spending about 10 billion a month and at the same time we see almost 80 billion in surplus. And then I'm reminded, and I think most folks are, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said in 2003 that the Iraqis could pay for reconstruction themselves and relatively soon. And I think we have a chart here, chart one, that shows that. Now it's quite obvious he was wrong or overstated or something because we pay twice. We've paid a 50 billion dollar reconstruction bill and now we're spending 10 billion a month and we're paying billions of dollar at the pump with gasoline."
Also hitting on that theme was US House Rep Allyson Schwartz, " We were led to believe several years ago that we would not have to pay for this war at all. And that's been pointed out as well. And yet we are right now spending billions of American tax payer dollars to reconstruct Iraq when Iraq has the money. And adding insult to injury we're spending a whole lot, every American family, on the price of gasoline that we're buying from the Iraqis. I mean something about this picture just isn't right no matter how you feel about this war or our going into it."
Marcy Kaptur raised the issue as well, " I remember Secretary [Paul] Wolfowitz coming up before our defense committee saying that we didn't have to worry about this because it would all be paid for. Well, where is he now? I have no idea where he is but he certainly wasn't correct in those statements which I think influenced a lot of the members of this Congress to vote in the way that they did."
Bob Etheridge also noted Wolfowitz and pointed the chart present documenting what Wolfowitz had told Congress in 2003.
The $400 billion Spratt mentioned is just the deficit for the US this year. As Christoff and US House Rep Dennis Moore would discuss, that's in addition to the $9.6 trillion US defecit debt already in existence. Schwartz drew a clear line between what's not getting funded in the US but is getting funded in Iraq, "I have to say representing the city of Philadelphia and the suburbs, I go to police stations and fire stations all across my district and they need reconstruction. And so instead of a president saying we're going to spend our dollars on reconstructing our police stations and helping our first responders we're spending American dollars on reconstruction in Iraq when the Iraqis are actually sitting on $79 billion." Etheridge also underscored where the US tax payer money wasn't going, "
And we have a myriad of spending needs here at home. I won't even go through the list, I just want to talk about one of them because we need to be building some school buildings in and around my district [second district of North Carolina] where we've got children in trailers and we've got one school that has 50% of our military children in buildings that ought to be able to have modern buildings."
Repeating, you can't spend what you don't have.
Nouri al-Maliki, puppet of the occupation, sits on billions and the Iraqi people suffer. While some organizations call for reperations for the Iraqi people, no one should assume that reperations can or should be made to a 'government' that does not represent the Iraqi people. As Kaptur noted, "Iraq has only spent 14% of the $28 billion it allocated to those sectors or less than 3% of the 10 billion that it had programmed from the year 2005 to 2008."
The money is not being spent on the Iraqi people or for their good. al-Maliki will gladly accept/grab any US dollars tossed his way. He'll continue sitting on them. He's a puppet and, come January, the administration that installed him will be gone. Add in that he's being forced to accept (in some form) the "Awakening" Council members (Sunnis) into his government and he'll gladly build up an even larger pile of cash to use to protect his own ass.
As US House Rep James McGovern pointed out, " And the government of Iraq, the Maliki government, I know that you didn't look at the issue of corruption, but it is corrupt. I wouldn't trust them to tell me the correct time."
The Iraqi government is corrupt. And that gets lost very often in the waves of Operation Happy Talk that attempt to convince us that 'progress' is being made or is about to be made. The benchmarks get fudged. US House Rep Lloyd Doggett hit hard on the benchmarks. He noted that by August 30, 2007, the GAO found that only three of the eighteen benchmarks had been met and, one year later, only one more benchmark can be called a success.
Doggett was methodical and used the bulk of his time to review the benchmarks and they do need reviewing because, time and again, a report will wrongly claim that the eighteen benchmarks were imposed on the administration by the Congress when the reality is the White House set them. By setting them, they obviously assumed (a lot like the treaty masquerading as the SOFA or the illegal war itself), that 'success' would shortly arrive. But it never has.
"All of us remember, except maybe President Bush, that in January of 2007, he selected the benchmarks, the guidelines by which to measure success, by which to measure victory in Iraq and when we sought an analysis so we would have an objective information instead of just the propaganda from the administration about whether those benchmarks had been met the Congress turned to the Government Accountability Office," Doggett noted early on.
And he went out noting that fact again, "And I see my time's up but, Mr. Chairman, we can keep going down the objectives that President Bush set himself for success, for victory in Iraq, and you'll find that it continues to fail. That this policy has been a failure, American tax payers are having to fund the failure while the Iraqis pay a fraction of the price we pay for a gallon of gasoline. Thank you."
The hearing explored (with some strong work by Kaptur) the economics in Iraq. The hearing also revealed that basic information the US tax payer should have is hidden. US House Rep Tim Bishop asked about the US predictions for the de-Baathification legistlation (if enacted, it still hasn't been) and he was told by Christoff that the information on that couldn't be discussed in an open hearing. Kaptur asked about basic stats and figures on the Iraqi oil ("Who's paying for it, how much is being smuggled, who did the smuggling, was anybody aprehended?") and was informed that the information wasn't "public domain" and that she'd have to refer to CIA reports.
It was a very important hearing. It would have been at any time but it was an especially significant hearing in a week when the US economy was suffering a meltdown/crisis. It just appears that a lot of people had other things to do. Other than inform.
[Jim note: C.I. covered the hearing in three days worth of snapshots. See C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot," "Iraq snapshot" and "Iraq snapshot."] [C.I. note: Mike covered Rep James McGovern's statements in "Ed loses."]