Robbery

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

-- Dwight Eisenhower

The hungry, the cold, the laborers, the scientists, and the children have never been deprived by an American President to the extent that George Bush has punished America.

As the U.S. enters its fourth year in Iraq this month, the annual cost of military operations is growing -- even as the Pentagon assumes the number of troops there will shrink.

Monthly expenditures are running at $5.9 billion; the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan adds roughly another $1 billion. Taken together, annual spending for the two wars will reach $117.6 billion for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 -- 18% above funding for the prior 12 months.

And what have this constant spending obtained for us? Well, we have managed to have Rummy blaming the very media that cheerleaded us into the war:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today presented an upbeat report of the conflict in Iraq and said he agrees with the commander of the U.S.-led coalition, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., that the news media has exaggerated the number of civilian casualties in the conflict....

The lying it's getting way too much.

Did the media manufacture this you asshole?

On Wednesday, at least 23 bodies — many of them hanged — were found dumped in parts of Baghdad, police said. Eighteen of the bodies were found in an abandoned minibus on a road between two mostly Sunni Muslim neighborhoods in western Baghdad.

Rumsfeld is delusional. Many on the Hill both Republican and Democrat have been quietly, and for the latter, not so quietly, asking for his removal since the Abu Ghraib photos came out.

The pattern for Iraq is going to be what it always is for the war enablers and the 101st Keyboarders. The fault doesn't lie with the people who started the war, and were responsibility for planning and implementation of war plans, nor will any responsibility lie with those who enable it and blindly cheered it on. No, rather than come to grips with any form of "reality" the loss of Iraq will fall upon their time tested targets. The rest of us for daring to oppose them, for warning them. As if wars and war plans were some metaphysical test of wills.

The "willpower" argument has always been a "bullshit argument" when it was Bush and his Administration that chose the time and place of the war and the method of its implementation. They cannot escape responsiblity.

But they'll try.