Iraq War Self Funded? Iraq Won't Even Put Something On It...

But Iraq has money, a nice oil surplus in spite of the fact that current oil exports haven't reached Saddam era levels. This is appalling.

Iraq is looking at a potential boon in oil revenue this year, possibly as much as $100 billion in 2007 and 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. military is having to buy its fuel on the open market, paying on average $3.23 a gallon and spending some $153 million a month in Iraq on fuel alone.

A back of the napkin analysis shows a $9.1 billion fuel bill for the whole time we were over there. To add fuel to the fire, Robert Bryce at The American Conservative points out that the $3.23/gallon number doesn't even include logistics costs. Those costs send estimates through the stratosphere since all that fuel for the US Military isn't even coming from Iraq. Bryce estimates the total fuel cost to be nearly a billion a week! The back of the napkin tells us that is nearly $240 billion just to keep our vehicles on the move since 2003.

The reality is that when it comes to occupation policy, the Bush administration doesn't even know what it is doing. We compare ourselves to the Romans or the British, but at least they had the good sense to pillage an area they spend so much blood and treasure to conquer. Exporting democracy to the world sounds well and good to most (unread) people - but the neocons never said we would do it for free.

When Are We Gonna Light This Candle?

Patrick Foy over at Taki's Top Drawer has a great article on the growing probability of a full scale war with Iran. Here is a key passage discussing President Ahmadinejad's recent visit to Columbia University in NYC.

The New York tabloids, the fashion plates reading the news at the cable networks, and the more expensive ones at the non-cable networks, and all leading presidential candidates had the same reaction to Ahmadinejad’s visit. One wonders if they were handed the same script and talking points, prepared in one central office. More likely, they just knew what was expected of them. The commentators brought in from the “think tanks” to elevate the discussion were ready to have a cow. These “experts” sputtered predictable, unenlightened accusations at Ahmadinejad, repeating ad nauseam that he is a dictator (preposterous) as well as a “Holocaust denier” (a deliberate distortion), that Iran is working feverishly to acquire nuclear weapons (flat out untrue) which will be used “to wipe Israel off the map” (a mistranslation and another distortion), et cetera. Faced with such hysteria, one could be forgiven for thinking that the world was about to spin off its axis.

It's funny, only online do we learn the reality that many of the key quotes from Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Holocaust were mistranslations and distortions. Not that they matter anyway, but they do whip up the war fever among folks who don't bother to check if the talking heads are telling the truth or spitting bs.