Closing in on Vietnam

IT IS $80 billion and halfway home to Vietnam.

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The fresh $80 billion just requested by President Bush pushes the war costs of Iraq and the amazing shrinking asterisk of Afghanistan (Osama been where?) past the $300 billion mark.

The estimated cost of Vietnam in current dollars was $584 billion, according to the Congressional Research Office. Iraq has already cost more in current dollars than either the Civil War or World War I. It is about to pass the Korean War. We are on pace to pass Vietnam in two or three years.

As Bush appears dead set on certifying Iraq's elections, even if it has the credibility of the Florida recount, his $80 billion brings us closer to certifying Iraq as, in financial terms, the most terrifying war on terror in American history.

Americans were made to believe we could defuse the most dangerous nation on earth in a bargain-basement rout. When former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay dared to suggest that an invasion would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion, White House budget director Mitch Daniels popped up to say the estimate was ''very, very high."

Daniels gave a cost of between $50 billion and $60 billion. Lindsay's estimate was also attacked by former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill who said, ''I don't know what Larry was thinking."

There was General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff who dared to say in a Senate hearing that ''something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be required after the invasion to maintain ''control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems." Shinseki said, ''It takes significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment to ensure that the people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz rebuked that sober assessment. He said Shinseki was ''wildly off the mark."

With each supplemental request, Iraq becomes the most wildly off the mark mission since Vietnam, making the neo-cons the biggest con artists of our generation.

Once they were looking for Osama. They forgot him trying to find Saddam Hussein. They claimed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction pointed at American air ducts and waterways. Instead we became as big a weapon of mass destruction as Saddam ever was -- assuming you believe the thousands of Iraqi civilians needlessly killed in our invasion were in fact human beings.

Vice President Dick Cheney once boasted that American forces would be ''greeted as liberators." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had ''broad and deep evidence" that once Saddam was captured, his former soldiers would throw down their arms and lock arms in celebration over a free Iraq.   Continued...