Rep. Dennis Kucinich: Time to Pull Plug on Iraq War $$
Tue Dec 05, 2006 at 12:10:23 PM PDT
In an interview with truthdig at http://www.truthdig.com/... , Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich makes the perfectly reasonable argument that it is time for Congress to stop providing ever-increasing funding for the war in Iraq:
War spending generates a forward momentum—the more you spend, the more you are going to spend in the future. And so regardless of what anyone in the Pentagon is saying, Congress has the obligation here to cut off funds, and that’s what I’m calling for. We have to stop this! We have to stop this war and we have to stop the potential expansion of the war and we have to stop this administration from getting another $130 billion to promote war anywhere [it] please[s].
More below the fold.
Far from advocating abandonment of the troops, Kucinich points out that the most recent "bridge" funding approved by Congress in the amount of $70 billion should last from October 1, 2006 through at least the end of June 2007, more that enough time and money to bring the troops home.
His real concern is the recent Pentagon request for an additional $130 billion in largely discritionary, off the books funds sought outside the normal budgetary process. What might the Pentagon want to do with such unprecedented largesse, one wonders?
This ought to be of concern to everyone because this could be used for continuing the war, expanding the war in Iraq. When you look at the England memo you see that they’re talking about costs to accelerate specific force capabilities necessary to prosecute the war. But because it is not specific—and think about a $130-billion appropriation that is not specific!— this could be used to fund a potential attack on Iran. This $130 billion could also be part of a slush fund for an expansion of military spending and essentially taking it off budget.
In other words, the ongoing, largely unaccounted-for special authorization money for the Iraq war and the ill-defined "global war on terror" may find its way into all sorts of shady, illicit and ill-advised adventurism on the part of the Defense Department, including an attack on Iran.
The global war on terror has become a license for the Bush administration to attack anyone anywhere, and there’s no accountability. The special inspector general for Iraq recently notified Congress that the United States sent 370,000 weapons over to Iraq but only recorded the serial numbers of 10,000 of those weapons. So what do you suppose that means? That means that with no accountability on weapons these weapons can go into anybody’s hands and no one will ever be able to trace it, because the serial numbers have not been recorded. This special inspector general has called corruption the second insurgency.
Faced with a President who appears to be so stubborn, irrational and paranoid that he is apparently prepared to ignore the advice of his outgoing Secretary of Defense and his Daddy's own hand-picked blue-ribbon panel of wise men that the time has come to cut-and-run, in a graceful, peace-with-honor sort of way, Kucinich thinks Congress may have no other mechanism to carry out the recent mandate of the people than to turn off the tap.
To which I say: Git 'er done!
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