Jump Out the Back, Jack

I had just finished the fourth grade on Friday before the Monday first thing in the morning bright and early when my Mother left my Daddy. That Friday had also been payday, and my Daddy had cashed his check and dutifully brought home the housekeeping and grocery money, such as it was. My Mother put me and my sisters on the bus with a transfer to make at Five Points in downtown Atlanta, as the moving van pulled away from the house where my Daddy would return after work to learn the empty truth.

Maybe that’s why I say it is ok with me to leave Iraq while nobody is looking. The dead of night. Or lunch time on the next to last dizzy day of the month of Ramadan self-denial and fasting. Just leave. Think of the traffic jam. I-285 and Spaghetti Junction, only no 8-lane super-highway modeled after the German Autobahn by General Eisenhower when he became President Eisenhower, just an old two-lane in the desert with sign posts pointing this way to Turkey, that way to Kuwait, the other way to Jordan. Of course, there will have to be a cease fire. Everybody freeze. Don’t anybody move. Not even an eyelash. Who is going to cover the back of the last American on the helicopter?

But on Day One, the new President did not ask me. Instead the Commander-In-Chief summoned his generals and ordered them to submit plans for ending the War in Iraq. Now he has announced withdrawal of all but 50,000 American troops by August 2010. Eighteen months. Not the 16 months he promised in the campaign. Why quibble and castigate? It is the end to the war we have but do not want by the duly elected government we have in the only world we have.

American power does not travel light, and not all of the $12 billion per month sent to Iraq has disappeared into thin air. Do the math. Six years, times 12 months per year, times $12 billion. I get $864 Billion. The kind of money being thrown around to Bail Out the current U.S. economic messes. In addition to uniformed American troops in Iraq, there are 100,000 contractors, 40,000 aircraft and vehicles, and 80,000 containers disbursed across more than 280 installations, according to Wired Blog Network.


U.S. Army Photo

The Baltimore Sun quotes one general as saying, "one Army office at one base is tracking 1.2 million items of property worth $14 billion, a partial list of materiel that includes objects such as dentist's chairs, chapel pews, swimming pool filtration systems and surveillance blimps. Separately, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which operates military supermarkets and shops across Iraq, holds an inventory that includes 2.7 million candy bars, 15,000 strips of beef jerky, 1.6 million cans of soda and 330,696 CDs and DVDs."

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Follow the Money to Iraq

I have watched the movie ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN many, many times. The thing I like the best about it is that I know how it is going to turn out. Probably the most famous line in the movie is “Follow the money.” It doesn’t take a clandestine meeting in a dark parking garage to know the truth of this traditional and often ignored axiom.

The new American Embassy under construction in Iraq has already cost over $600 Million and is not finished yet, and there is no end in sight, like the war itself. Last year Congress appropriated some $1.3 Billion for the project. Plans call for the new embassy to have all the luxuries and necessities of the modern self-contained fortress, its own water, utilities, and sewage treatment, swimming pool, gym, and food court. It will be ten times the size of any other embassy. Anywhere. Ever. Although many details are classified, most of the construction work is being done by a contractor with close ties to Halliburton, the company, well you know which company Halliburton is. Edward Peck, a former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq told NPR recently he thinks the project is out of hand and inappropriate. He has the novel idea that American Embassies should be for diplomacy, reporting to the U.S. government frankly and without agenda what is going on in the host country and telling the government of the host country what is going on in the United States. Ed Peck and I were neighbors in Cairo, Egypt, when we both served at the American Embassy there during the Carter administration. We did not work directly together and certainly were not pals, but he was disliked and disrespected by most of the people I did work with directly, and that was enough for me to hold him in high regard and trust.

The price tag for the War in Iraq runs about $12-Billion per month. I guess I could try to calculate how much this comes to per day, but I’m not sure how many zeroes there are in a billion. You, too? I know that pretty soon this will “add up to some real money,” as Ev Dirksen, the late U.S. Senator from Illinois used to say in a unique and lovely voice. He was a Republican but a very charming one. The War in Iraq is not about money. But what is about? Supporting the troops? Avenging America for a fiendish attack at its busy heart by a ubiquitous enemy. Oil? Middle East security and stability? Certainly not about money. My beer buddy Luther says, when people say it’s not about money, it’s usually about the money.

In the early days of the War in Iraq, the Americans in charge lost $9 Billion. Misplaced it. Vanished. Poof. Into thin air. Now you see it, now you don’t. Nobody knows exactly what happened. Maybe it was bad bookkeeping. Some of it was loaded on an airplane and shipped to Baghdad in duffle bags crammed with freshly printed $100 bills bundled and wrapped in heat-shrink plastic. Maybe it fell out of the airplane or off the truck when it was unloaded. Why worry or make a big deal out of this? It was not even our money anyway. No harm to the U.S. taxpayer. It was money about Iraqi oil, “Oil for Food Program” money. That was a humanitarian program that allowed Iraq, despite an oil embargo, to sell some oil in order to keep the Iraqi people from going hungry. If the money got lost, did the food part go missing, too?

(Originally posted 9-19-07)

Copyright 2007 by William C. Cotter