Steve Gilliard writes in a more rough-and-tumble way than most of the blogs I read regularly. But he comes up with a lot of good articles, and his commentary is usually on the mark, though sometimes acidly expressed. He found this one in the London Guardian:
The Pentagon has long been a notoriously badly run agency. It cannot even lock people up in Guantanamo Bay without making a mess of it. It wastes taxpayers' dollars on an epic scale. It buys pork-barrel weapons systems nobody needs; it often simply cannot account for its spending; it hands out jobs-for-the-boys to people like Iran-Contra's John Poindexter. Now it emerges that it has been blithely selling surplus biological weapons equipment on the internet. Why anybody ever imagined that the Pentagon, of all organisations, was competent to manage Iraq is a great mystery of our time. Why Mr Rumsfeld is still US defence secretary is an even bigger one.
From the same paper, he also points out an article by Suzanne Goldenberg (who I quoted a few days ago) about another of Viceroy Jerry Bremer's great ideas in Iraq (my emphasis in bold):
[T]he occupation authority is making preparations to dismantle the food distribution system which gave free rations of flour, rice, cooking oil and other staples to every Iraqi.
Described by the UN as the world's most efficient food network, the system still keeps Iraqis from going hungry. But the US civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, views it as a dangerous socialist anachronism. The coalition provisional authority (CPA) is planning to abolish it in January, despite warnings from its own technical experts that this could lead to hunger and riots.
Gilliard's observation on that news includes this (but go read the whole thing):
The UN food program works. What in God's name do they plan to replace it with when they can barely supply US troops as is. When they tried to sell water in Umm Qasr, there were riots. You take the food out of Baghdadis mouths, Sadr City will swarm over CPA headquaters like locusts.
2 comments:
Back in August, the PBS program "NOW with Bill Moyers did a show on Pentagon spending. It was a real eye-opener. We are spending $1 BILLION A DAY on defense. This doesn't pay for fighting any wars, that costs extra. Every government agency is required every year to do an audit. The Pentagon gets a pass because they can't get the books to balance. They don't know where the money is going. Check out the transcript of the show at http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript230_full.html
Yeah, it seems to me that one of the side-effects of the all-volunteer army is that it produced a kind of abstract sentimentality about the military. Combined with other factors, it shielded the Pentagon from the kind of public and Congressional skepticism some of its more crackpot programs deserve. On the face of it, for the US to be spending half the military budgets of the entire world seems absurd. - Bruce
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