ROGER SIMON COLUMN
JANUARY 26, 2005
WASHINGTON - - The man on the nightly news is telling me that the Bush administration is asking Congress for an additional $80 billion in "emergency" spending, most of which will go to fight the war in Iraq.
This means a war that has been costing us about $1 billion per week, will cost even more, with no end in sight.
Several stories later, the man on the news tells me that while all U.S. passenger airliners are highly vulnerable to terrorist attack in this country by shoulder-fired missiles, the cost of installing an anti-missile system on our airliners is "prohibitively" expensive.
According to a Rand Corp. study, installing anti-missile technology on U.S. passenger airliners would cost $11 billion and about $2.1 billion per year to maintain. So, obviously, we can't afford it.
The man on the nightly news does not link these stories. But I think we should:
For the cost of about four months of the Iraq war, we could start to protect every flyer in America from missile attack. (No anti-missile system is perfect, obviously. But it would be better than nothing, which is what we have now.)
But we can't afford to spend the money at home, because we've got to spend the money in Iraq on what even the Bush administration admits was a mistaken war (i.e. we thought Saddam Hussein had massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and was an imminent threat to use them, which was not true.)
Another mistake was the belief we could pay for the war, the occupation, and the re-building of Iraq through Iraqi oil revenues. This has turned out to be an illusion.
And, hey, remember how we were going to get a whole bunch of "allies" to help out in Iraq by sending both troops and money? This turned out to be an illusion also.
The U.S. taxpayer is footing the bill for Iraq and will continue to do so.
Why is it costing so much?
A "senior administration official" told reporters, "There is no question that (the insurgents), with relatively small expenditures, are proving themselves to be able to force us into much larger ones."
Can anybody say: Vietnam?
This is a very chilling statement. It means that the insurgents - - who lack the air power, armored vehicles, artillery, laser-guided weapons, electronic surveillance, etc., etc. that we have - - have considerable power over us: through "relatively small expenditures" they can force the United States to spend billions and billions.
Want one example? Out of the $80 billion in new spending that President Bush is asking for, $1 billion will go to detect roadside bombs.
The roadside bombs cost the insurgents virtually nothing. Most were stolen from huge arms depots that U.S. troops - - who were spread very thin - - failed to guard after our invasion of Iraq.
So for those keeping score, the insurgents, who show no signs of giving up any time soon, are forcing the United States to spend billions abroad that we should be spending at home.
Does this make sense to anybody?
Of course we have to protect our troops. But one way of protecting them is to force the Iraqis to take responsibility for fighting for their own country so our troops can return to theirs.
Posted by rsimon at January 26, 2005 02:58 PM