Richard Whalen

Congress is preparing to debate President Bush’s latest request for $108 billion in a supplemental packageto continue military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through next September 30th.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has calculated the costs of the two wars down to the second – an attention getter in a chamber where billions become blurred in debate.

The big bipartisan push on Capitol Hill is for the Baghdad regime of oil-rich Iraq to be pushed to spend the “financial windfall” of some $60 billion from soaring oil revenues on the country’s “reconstruction.” In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a group of 10 senators – six Democrats and four Republicans – declared: “The time has come to end this blank-check policy and require the Iraqis to invest in their own future.”

“The President has not been honest about the costs of the war from the beginning,” said Senator Reid.
Many Republican lawmakers face tough re-election fights and are reacting strongly to grassroots dissatisfaction with the war and its human and financial costs. The U.S. is defending an Iraqi government content to let the U.S. fight the war for its country’s future and pay for it as well.

During the past two years, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), head of the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, and his large staff have assembled a vast amount of information on Iraq-related fraud, waste and abuse in U.S. military payments to favored contractors, who paid bribes and kickbacks. Hundreds of millions of dollars in cash poured into Iraq in 2003 and 2004 in the form of brick-shaped bound $100 bills, and circulated with little accountability. Levin plans to hold a series of hearings during the early summer, highlighting the Bush Administration’s mismanagement of the Iraq war. Senators are furious to learn that, after five years of fighting, GIs still lack body armor and armored humvees.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, who has won the GOP nomination, is taking a super-hawkish stance on the war in Iraq, which he says it is close to success. McCain echoes Bush and goes beyond him in calling for a confrontational U.S. strategy toward Russia and China, and the creation of a global “League of Democracies,” a permanent coalition that would have U.S. guarantees of protection.

In our conversations, McCain has identified himself as “something of a neoconservative.” Indeed, his recent speeches bear out that label.

But Republicans in the House and Senate, anxious about re-election, will be cool to McCain’s grandiose, incoherent global strategizing. The temper of Congress is to do less and press allies to do more. McCain is out of step.