Our looted future – Chapter 2,115

Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker asks, “Brother can you spare a quarter of a trillion dimes?”

Before you read the snip from today’s LA Times, wash this quote from Vice Chancellor Cheney around in your mouth to temper you palate just right.

“It [Iraq] was the right thing to do and if we had it to do over again, we'd do exactly the same thing."

Now remind yourself that this is not a quote from 2003.

Or 2004.

Or 2005.

No this is from Cheney on “Meet the Press” two weeks ago.

Now this from the LA Times…

Army Warns Rumsfeld It's Billions Short

An extraordinary action by the chief of staff sends a message: The Pentagon must increase the budget or reduce commitments in Iraq and elsewhere.
By Peter Spiegel
Times Staff Writer

September 25, 2006

WASHINGTON — The Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.

"This is unusual, but hell, we're in unusual times," said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.

Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.

According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army's budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker's request a 41% increase over current levels.

"It's incredibly huge," said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. "These are just incredible numbers."

Most funding for the fighting in Iraq has come from annual emergency spending bills, with the regular defense budget going to normal personnel, procurement and operational expenses, such as salaries and new weapons systems.

About $400 billion has been appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through emergency funding measures since Sept. 11, 2001, with the money divided among military branches and government agencies.

…

The Army, with an active-duty force of 504,000, has been stretched by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About 400,000 have done at least one tour of combat duty, and more than a third of those have been deployed twice. Commanders have increasingly complained of the strain, saying last week that sustaining current levels will require more help from the National Guard and Reserve or an increase in the active-duty force.

Schoomaker first raised alarms with Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June after he received new Army budget outlines from Rumsfeld's office. Those outlines called for an Army budget of about $114 billion, a $2-billion cut from previous guidelines. The cuts would grow to $7 billion a year after six years, the senior Army official said.

...

[A] study group — which included three-star officers from the Army and Rumsfeld's office — has since agreed with the Army's initial assessment. Officials say negotiations have moved to higher levels of the Bush administration, involving top aides to Rumsfeld and White House Budget Director Rob Portman.

"Now the discussion is: Where are we going to go? Do we lower our strategy or do we raise our resources?" said the senior Pentagon official. "That's where we're at."

…

Funding was further complicated this summer, when rising sectarian violence in Baghdad forced the Pentagon to shelve plans to gradually reduce troops in Iraq.

Because of those pressures, the Army in July announced it was freezing civilian hiring and new weapons contract awards and was scaling back on personnel travel restrictions, among other cost cuts.

Schoomaker has been vocal in recent months about a need to expand war funding legislation to pay for repair of hundreds of tanks and armored fighting vehicles after heavy use in Iraq.

He has told congressional appropriators that he will need $17.1 billion next year for repairs, nearly double this year's appropriation — and more than quadruple the cost two years ago. According to an Army budget document obtained by The Times, Army officials are planning repair requests of $13 billion in 2008 and $13.5 billion in 2009.

In recent weeks, however, Schoomaker has become more publicly emphatic about budget shortfalls, saying funding is not enough to pay for Army commitments to the Iraq war and the global strategy outlined by the Pentagon.

"There's no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget," Schoomaker said in a recent Washington address.

…

"Year after year there were attempts to raise the ceiling, but year after year OMB has refused," said a former Pentagon official familiar with the debate. "The difference this year is the Army has said that if a raise in the ceiling isn't going to be considered, they won't even play the game."

…

Rumsfeld has not set a new deadline for the Army to submit its budget plan. The Army official said staffers thought they could submit a revised plan by November, in time for President Bush to unveil his 2008 budget early next year.

Budgets are interesting documents, because they are the exact point at which the rubber of your rhetoric meets the road of Reality.

For three years, the GOP has done its fan dance of smoke and mirrors about the single most important issues of our time – the catastrophic failures of this Administration at every level and on every front. From the ongoing, escalating debacle in Iraq to the Norquist Manifesto that this government made fatally manifest in the streets of dead New Orleans, the Bush White House has show itself to be simultaneously ignorant, arrogant and spectacularly incompetent at the most basic tasks of governance, and at a scale that we have never seen before, in our lifetimes and possibly in our nation’s history.

They have ruled elbow-deep in the blood and sacrifice of their betters with a ruthless, giddy pleasure, obeying one and only one commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Inconvenience Thy Fellow Rich, White Plutocrats For Any Reason.”

George Bush has gotten up every day for the last three years and has bludgeoned home the same, simple message in every speech he ever gives, whether to Rotarians in Tallahassee, Americans in Urgent National Addresses, or Barney the White House dog when he is making his morning ablutions in the POTUS potty;

“Barney, Iraq is more important thing evah! More important than World War Two. More important than Korea. More important that that Cuban Missile dealie. And more important than taking you out for a walk.

“And I must do whatever I feel is necessary on a mood-swing-by-mood-swing basis to make sure that we achieve victory, just as soon as Cheney tells me how we are defining ‘victory’ this week. We must prevail in Iraq, no matter…”

It is at this point that Dubya trails off because Barney has pooped the carpet in the People’s House. Again. Which means four things will happen before lunch:

1. Barney will be awarded another special Presidential Medal of Freedom in a private, Rose Garden ceremony.
2. Cheney will find some mailroom intern to be rendered and beaten with a claw hammer until he confesses to pooping the carpet.
3. Rummy will declare that another corner has been turned.
4. Rove will begin to leak stories that Democrats are weak on carpet pooping.

Meanwhile, George Bush could solve the military budget problem relatively simply by calling for sacrifice and asking those that most benefited from his reckless, profligate tax cuts to now give something back to help our kids overseas.

He could denounce the looting the billions of dollars in Iraq and demand a full investigation.

He could barnstorm the country, tapping into his vast network of donors and political allies, asking the Party Leaders who now run the country root and branch to lead by example and urge their children to join the Army and Dubya's Noble Cause.

If he were serious, he could invest the salvation of the Army and its mission with at least the same zeal he once gave to the demolition of Social Security.

If Iraq were truly as important as he claims with every breath he takes, he could do all of this easily. He could spend all Fall on it, and by November he would have begun to show the world that America is deadly serious about Iraq, and show voters that Republicans are deadly serious about national security.

It would be win-win-win...if Bush were serious.

But of course Bush will do none of this, because if he did his base would turn on him like wild dogs.

Because his rich backers don’t give a shit about this country and never have, and would have his hide to upholster their Mercedes’ if he laid a federal finger on their wallets.

Because his base is that solid slab of invincibly ignorant dittoheads at the bottom of Evolution’s barrel that know nothing, stand for nothing and remember nothing but fetishize every word the Dear Leader speaks because that’s just how fascists are wired.

The Dear Leader promised them all that they never need to worry their tiny heads over math, or science or causality again. He promised them that Voting 2+2= 177 makes 2+2= 177 damn it! He promised them boundless Victory after Victory. He promised them ouchless, teevee friendly Shock and Awe Military Miracles for two pennies apiece…forever.

All along, responsible grownups warned the Whiny Ass Titty Babies of the Right that sooner than they could imagine the piper would have to be paid. And all along Whiny Ass Titty Babies of the Right called them traitors and haters. Told them that the Dear Leader had repealed arithmetic and to shut the fuck up.

That they will gladly pay you Tuesday for their World War Three today.

And now, in too many dreadful ways to count, that IOU is coming due.

Because no matter how many bills the GOP pass and no matter how many speeches Dubya gives promising the mouthbreathers otherwise, the tide will always come, and Reality will always have her merry way with us.