The real costs of Bush's excellent Iraq adventure

I have a longer post at Detroit News this morning on the history of the White House's misspending of funds extorted under the same panic mode they're now creating over the Wall St meltdown but I want to flag a couple of current items of interest for context.

I'm not sure if this is addition or just part of the already documented misplaced funds, but I suspect it's the latter.

A former Iraqi official estimated yesterday that more than $13 billion meant for reconstruction projects in Iraq was wasted or stolen through elaborate fraud schemes. [...]

While many of the projects audited "were not needed -- and many were never built," he said, "this very real fact remains: Billions of American dollars that paid for these projects are now gone."

And, no surprise here either but Maliki just confirmed that the decisions over the continued deployment of our troops in the occupation without end was strictly political.

[D]uring an interview with Iraqi television last week (according to an Open Source Center translation), Maliki suggested that the U.S. presidential elections played a role:

Actually, the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the [U.S] domestic situation so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date.

And yet, McCain and his pet pit bull Palin still draw crowds that chant USA in the misguided belief that anything resembling a 'victory' can be acheived. It occurred to me last night that outside of the cultural wedge issues, the single biggest thing driving McCain's support are people who still believe that Iraq is somehow instrumental in solving terrorism and winnable by any meaningful metric.

One might ask these folks, whom I'm sure are well intentioned, what good victory would do anyway, assuming it could be declared in some meaningful way, if our troops ultimately come home to a country in complete economic and social shambles. In the end, the economic meltdown and the occupation are still inextricably entwined as far as I can see. I don't understand why so many fail to see it as well.

[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]