In anger and embarrassment, Congressional Republicans are scrambling to repair a budget shortfall in veterans’ medical care now that the Bush administration has admitted it vastly underestimated the number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan personnel needing treatment. The $1 billion-plus gaffe is considerable, with the original budget estimate of 23,553 returned veterans needing care this year now ballooning to 103,000. American taxpayers should be even more furious than Congress.

The Capitol’s Republican majorities have shown no hesitation in signing the president’s serial blank-check supplemental budgets for waging the war, yet they repeatedly ignored months of warnings from Democrats that returning veterans were being shortchanged. One Republican who warned of the problem - Representative Christopher Smith of New Jersey - lost his chairmanship of the Veterans Affairs Committee after pressing his plea too boldly before the House leadership.

But partisan resistance melted in a flood of political chagrin once the administration admitted the budget error, which was first discovered in April but only now disclosed. The explanation offered - the gaffe was due to using dated formulas based on prewar calculations - left Republicans sputtering all the more.

All wars necessarily involve mismanagement, even successful ones. But there is no excuse for treating the needs of wounded and damaged warriors as a budgetary afterthought. Congressional Republicans were far from innocent victims of administrative ineptitude or deception. After years of approving record tax cuts and budget deficits, they stuck to this year’s pre-election script of fictitious “budget tightening” that underestimated inevitable expenses and shortchanged returning veterans with higher health care enrollment fees and drug co-payments. The only comfort for the American public is that unlike many of the war’s problems, this one can be repaired, providing partisan combat is suspended in the Capitol.

NYTimes Editorial

On July 2, 2003, with evidence mounting that U.S. troop strength in Iraq was inadequate, Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House, “There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, Bring ‘em on.”

It was an immature display of street-corner machismo that appalled people familiar with the agonizing ordeals of combat. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, was quoted in The Washington Post as saying: “I am shaking my head in disbelief. When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander - let alone the commander in chief - invite enemies to attack U.S. troops.”

The American death toll in Iraq at that point was about 200, but it was clear that a vicious opposition was developing. Mr. Bush had no coherent strategy for defeating the insurgency then, and now - more than 1,500 additional deaths later - he still doesn’t.

The incompetence at the highest levels of government in Washington has undermined the U.S. troops who have fought honorably and bravely in Iraq, which is why the troops are now stuck in a murderous quagmire. If a Democratic administration had conducted a war this incompetently, the Republicans in Congress would be dusting off their impeachment manuals.

Bob Herbert | NYTimes (read more. . .)

The American people have only two choices on what to do next: they can continue to send their young soldiers into the Iraqi death trap for at least the next several years and hope for the best, or they can build a movement for impeaching George W. Bush and other administration officials - and then try to make the best of a bad situation in Iraq.

Although the realistic prospects for electing a Congress in 2006 that would act against Bush may appear slim, an impeachment movement would create at least a focus for a national political campaign, much like the Republicans used the Contract with America to gain their congressional majorities in 1994.

An impeachment strategy would have two other benefits: it would create the framework for an official investigation into the deceptions that led the nation to war in 2002-2003 (as well as into the incompetence with which the war was fought) and it would offer a legal structure for achieving some accountability.

No accountability means that a precedent has been set for future presidents misleading the nation into other aggressive wars of choice and paying no price.

While many liberals and Democrats reject an impeachment strategy - fearing that it would be too confrontational and carry too many political risks - there are dangers, too, in again trying to finesse the Iraq War, as Democrats did in the disastrous elections of 2002 and 2004.

Robert Parry | Consortium News (read more. . .)

Forget the documentary evidence (the Downing Street minutes) that the war on Iraq was fraudulent from the outset. Forget that the U.S. and U.K. starting pulverizing Iraq with stepped-up bombing months before president or prime minister breathed a word to Congress or Parliament. Forget that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his merry men-his co-opted, castrated military brass-have no clue regarding what U.S. forces are up against in Iraq. The president insists that we must stay the course.

As was the case in Vietnam, the Iraq war is being run by civilians innocent of military experience and disdainful of advice from the colonels and majors who know which end is up. Aping the president’s practice of surrounding himself with sycophants, Rumsfeld has promoted a coterie of yes-men to top military ranks-men who “kiss up and kick down,” in the words of former Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford, describing UN-nominee John Bolton’s modus operandi at the State Department. So when the president assures us, as he did yesterday, that he will be guided by the “sober judgment of our military leaders” he is referring to the castrati.

Ray McGovern | CounterPunch (read more. . .)

President Bush told the nation last night that the war in Iraq was difficult but winnable. Only the first is clearly true. Despite buoyant cheerleading by administration officials, the military situation is at best unimproved. The Iraqi Army, despite Mr. Bush’s optimistic descriptions, shows no signs of being able to control the country without American help for years to come. There are not enough American soldiers to carry out the job they have been sent to do, yet the strain of maintaining even this inadequate force is taking a terrible toll on the ability of the United States to defend its security on other fronts around the world.

We did not expect Mr. Bush would apologize for the misinformation that helped lead us into this war, or for the catastrophic mistakes his team made in running the military operation. But we had hoped he would resist the temptation to raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks. We had hoped that he would seize the moment to tell the nation how he will define victory, and to give Americans a specific sense of how he intends to reach that goal - beyond repeating the same wishful scenario that he has been describing since the invasion.

NYTimes Editorials (read more. . .)

The world press sees Bush as an arrogant hypocrite who justifies his invasion of Iraq in the name of democracy, while protecting Uzbek’s murderous dictator Islam Karimov, described by Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan as “very much George Bush’s man in Central Asia.”

On May 13, Karimov had 500 protesters shot down in the streets of Andijan and 200 massacred in Pakhtabad. Still more civilians were massacred by Karimov while attempting to flee into neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

It was the Bush administration that blocked a call by NATO for an international investigation of the Uzbek massacre. According to news reports, Karimov has agreed, for a suitable payment from US taxpayers, for Bush to attack Iran from bases in Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan also serves as one of the Bush administration’s offshore torture centers to which suspected terrorists are sent.

Deceived American patriots dismiss such reports as leftwing fabrications. However, human rights groups have documented these abuses. Moreover, on June 24 an Italian judge ordered the arrests of 13 CIA agents, who kidnapped a Muslim in Italy and secreted him to Egypt, another offshore US torture center. The 13 CIA agents managed to stick the US taxpayers with a $144,984 hotel bill in the process.

It would be interesting to have a comparison of the hourly Uzbek and Egyptian torture rates. US taxpayers have a right to know how many of their hard-earned tax dollars, given up on pain of prison sentences, are flowing to offshore torture centers.

Paul Craig Roberts | CounterPunch (read more. . .)

The war in Iraq was sold to the American public the way a cheap car salesman sells a lemon. Dick Cheney assured the nation that Americans in Iraq would be “greeted as liberators.” Kenneth Adelman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board said the war would be a “cakewalk.” And Donald Rumsfeld said on National Public Radio: “I can’t say if the use of force would last five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”

The hot-for-war crowd never mentioned young men and women being shipped back to their families deceased or maimed. Nor was there any suggestion that a broad swath of the population should share in the sacrifice.

Now, with the war going badly and the Army chasing potential recruits with a ferocity that is alarming, a backlash is developing that could cripple the nation’s ability to wage war without a draft. Even as the ranks of new recruits are dwindling, many parents and public school officials are battling the increasingly heavy-handed tactics being used by military recruiters who are desperately trying to sign up high school kids.

………

What’s not so wonderful is that this war with no end in sight is becoming an ever more divisive issue for Americans. A clear divide is developing between those who want to continue the present course and those who feel it’s time to craft an exit strategy.

But with volunteers in extremely short supply, an even more emotional divide is occurring over the ways in which soldiers for this war are selected. Increasing numbers of Americans are recognizing the inherent unfairness of the all-volunteer force in a time of war. That emotional issue will become more heated as the war continues. And it is sure to resonate in the wars to come.

Bob Herbert | NYTimes (read more. . .)