Iraq supplemental budget

Deeply buried in the Bush administration's 97-page supplemental budget request for $81.9 billion ($75 billion of it for the Pentagon), mainly to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is one sentence that expresses—more succinctly and shockingly than any official statement to date—just how little progress we've made toward making Iraq a stable nation.

It's there in the section dealing with the $5.7 billion requested for the "Iraq Security Force Fund," which notes that the interim Iraqi government, with assistance from coalition nations, has already created a security force of 90 battalions, but then adds:

All but one of these 90 battalions, however, are lightly equipped and armed, and have very limited mobility and sustainment capabilities.

In other words, 89 of Iraq's 90 battalions essentially cannot fight.

[...]

During Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings last month, Sen. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the foreign relations committee, said he'd been told that of the 120,000 security forces that Rice maintained existed, only 4,000—or 3 percent—were well-trained. Now the administration is admitting, in the pursuit of seeking more money to improve matters, that the real number is more like 1 percent.

Either that, or they're padding the request.

In the section that requests $17.3 billion for Army operations and maintenance, there is a reference to $400 million needed to support "lift and sustainment costs of coalition partners"—in other words, to bring the coalition forces to Iraq ("lift") and keep them freshly supplied ("sustainment"). In the section on a $3.5 billion request for "Defense-wide" operations and maintenance (DoD programs outside the province of the Army or any other service), there's another $208 million "for lift and sustainment of coalition partners."

In other words, our "coalition partners" have joined our cause, at least in part because the U.S. government is reimbursing $608 million of their expenses.

I believe that is why they were early on tagged "the Coalition of the Bribed", which seemed to offend the 101st Fighting Keyboarders.

his supplemental includes quite a lot of money for items that have nothing to do with the costs of war in Iraq. Last week, I mentioned one of these items—roughly $5 billion to start reorganizing the U.S. Army. A scouring of the full document—which went up on the White House Web site Monday—reveals others. A few examples:

Get them here at Slate.

....or do what you want....you will anyway.