Taxpayer Funded Insurgency

by digby

I hate to be a killjoy and all, and I’m normally a big fan of foreign aid and helping out the less fortunate around the world, but this additional billion for reconstruction in Iraq just strikes me as the last Republican boondoggle before they retire to count their ill-gotten gains and let the Democrats try to clean up the messes they’ve created here and around the world (while they scream bloody murder about runaway liberal spending.)

I’m not sure what to do about this, but there is no doubt that Iraq is a money pit and it makes me feel sick to my stomach to watch these people sharpening their “tax and spend” rhetoric, and gettng ready to stab the Democrats repeatedly with it while they wrap themselves in the flag and throw thousand dollar bills at their massive failure.

Clay Risen in TNR spells out the Democrats’ dilemma in this passage discussing deficit reduction:

In the face of Iraq, alternative minimum tax (AMT) reform, and an already bloated budget, any meaningful cuts will take significant belt-tightening, which will leave Democrats vulnerable to angry constituents and cynical GOP attacks. This doesn’t mean deficit reduction is a bad idea. On the contrary, unless the laws of economics are rewritten, our monstrous debt will eventually come due. But it does mean that the more Democrats brag about reducing the deficit, the more they play into the clever trap that Republicans have laid for retaking the Hill . . .

“What voters do get is taxes. Which is where the cynical genius of the GOP’s return strategy becomes apparent. They realize that, thanks to their own profligacy, any serious effort to cut the deficit will require either eliminating most of the Bush tax cuts or raising taxes elsewhere . . . They’ve created a situation that Democrats rightly believe requires immediate attention, but which demands a solution that may very well make them so unpopular that voters will return to the right in 2008.”

In light of that, I’m not sure that it isn’t a good idea for the Democrats to argue that the Republicans want to keep sending good money after bad in Iraq but oppose things like allowing American seniors to get a decent deal on prescriptions. It’s a sort of ugly side of populism, but it’s not entirely irrational.

I feel for the Iraqis, don’t get me wrong — but I can’t help but believe that sending billions more into “reconstruction” at this point is akin to flushing it down the toilet. In fact, what I’m hearing today is that they plan to put the money into the hands of commanders on the ground to “hire” Iraqis — which sounds to me as if we are going to start directly funding various sides in the civil war who will spend the money on arms and bombs to kill Americans and each other.

I’m generally uncomfortable with the idea of failing to fund the “soft” side of the occupation. But I can’t see how it’s going to any more good this time than it did when they were flying in planeloads of money a couple of years ago that they never accounted for. These are people who can’t do anything right and it’s just too late for them to change now.

Update: Here’s a video from CNN on this subject. (Scroll down to the fourth paragraph from the end.)

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