| David Corn in the Washington Post rebutts neo-con hack Bill Kristol's seemingly delusional assertion that history will remember George W. Bush's presidency as a roaring success (and that, my friends, was a hard sentence to type without laughing or crying). The whole piece is a must read, but one particular sentence just made me think for a moment: Still, Kristol advises, stick with the "surge," train more Iraqi troops, and all will be well. The United States has already spent $19 billion training 346,500 or so Iraqi troops and police officers, and now merely six battalions -- down from 10, according to Gen. Peter Pace -- can function independently. That is, only 3,000 Iraqi troops are operating on their own after all this time and money. Now if you do the math it means that the going rate for each successful Iraqi military or police officer to "stand up so we can stand down" is a breathtaking 6.3 million dollars (in the Bush ledger, that's one post-Katrina superdome repair). Hey, it's only money. |
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