What a time for the Bush administration to go crawling to Congress to beg for another $25 billion for the war. Tesitfying on behalf of the request was the ever-present Paul Wolfowitz, who in testimony only weeks ago misstated the number of American dead: he was 30 percent short. The financial profligacy of this administration cannot produce images quite as riveting as those coming out of Abu Ghraib, but they come close.
A Washington Post analysis of the costs points out that the war has already cost US taxpayers, in terms adjusted for inflation, more than World War I. This military spending drains the private sector of resources but it pumps up particular industries and has an impact on the GDP. Already military spending is up more than 15 percent over last year when the war was supposedly over. If we ever needed an example of military Keynesianism to compare with the absurd wastes of World War II, this is it.
As for the visual image that everyone demands, the still shot that captures the very essence of violence against taxpayers and licentious squandering of wealth, consider these shocking pictures (clear the children from the room):
