This morning’s NY Times points out the obvious: Mr Bu$h’s ego-war is damned expensive.

President Bush waited until he had vetoed a relatively inexpensive children’s health insurance bill before asking for tens of billions of dollars more for his misadventure in Iraq. The cynicism of that maneuver is only slightly less shameful than the president’s distorted priorities. Despite a pretense of fiscal prudence, Mr. Bush keeps throwing money at his war, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure or children’s health care.

Mr. Bush is threatening to veto most of the 12 domestic spending bills now before Congress because Democrats want to provide $22 billion more than the $933 billion he has requested. His argument? Something about the president’s responsibility to rein in lawmakers’ “temptation to overspend.”

This from a leader who turns federal surpluses into deficits, believes that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can be financed on a separate set of books with borrowed money, and keeps having to go back to Congress for “emergency funding” because he cannot or will not tell the truth about what it is costing to fight these wars.[emph added]

Well, I can’t think of much to add, actually. This is like reading the Times of pre-1993 when the paper actually acted like a responsible public entity.

The Bu$h malAdministration elected to fight a war in Iraq despite the lack of logic to support that. In fact, we’ve seen that Mr Bu$h was actually determined to attack Iran in 1999, which is not surprising, since his brother JEB! joined up as a charter member of PNAC in 1996. A lot of people have accused PNAC of being war-mongers. Not true. They’re bat-shit crazy war-mongers. The original manifesto was clear: all of the Middle East must be “transformed” into a “lake of democracy” so that the little boat USS United States could cruise effortlessly and easily on its unrolled waters. There’s hardly a nation in the world that has achieved democracy without violence, and they planned for violence in the Middle East, picking Iraq as their starting point. They judged correctly that it was the central point in the region and massive military power could be exercised from there in order to assure that all the other countries thought “correctly,” as our old friends in the USSR described it.

Mr. Bush has said most of the new money would go for “day-to-day” military operations and “basic needs” like bullets, body armor and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, which are designed to withstand bomb attacks, a rising threat to American forces in Iraq. The troops need safer vehicles and better armor, but it is beyond our ken why Mr. Bush could not cover this in his original budget submission, unless he wanted to confuse the public and limit Congressional oversight.

Actually, not all that money is going for “day-to-day” operations, as we’ll see in another commentary. [ed: below] Some part of this demand – because that is what it is when Mr Bu$h tells Congress to cough up some more of our grandchildren’s future – is going to MRAPs because the Iraqi resistance has discovered a really terrific way of fighting the occupation. IEDs have killed off quite a few American soldiers, and wounded many more. I can‘t help think that if there really is a heaven and hell Sam Adams is nudging Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee and Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion in the ribs and saying, “Don’t you wish we’d had something like that? Ah! How we could have slaughtered the English with them! We’d have been free years sooner.”

We’ll have more about MRAPs in another commentary. [ed: below]

Mr Bu$h is determined that not one soldier leave Iraq unless he is replaced by another, because his famous gut tells him this is the proper way to deliver the Middle East to the bat-shit crazy war-mongers of PNAC. Plus, it’s damned good for his best friends, the defense industry, and big corporations, including Big Oil.

Ironically enough, taming all the Arab countries, and turning them into either outright satraps or Western-aligned “democracies” is exactly what Oded Yinon described in the mid-80s in his “Strategy for a Greater Israel” in the Middle East. But I’m not allowed to suggest that our foreign and military policy is being run from Tel Aviv, because that would be anti-Semitic.