Auditing the War

[babylonsister]

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=auditing_the_war

Auditing the War

Claire McCaskill, who has Harry Truman's old Senate seat, returns from Iraq with some blunt talk on the war and contracting abuse.

Terence Samuel | June 22, 2007 | web only


Claire McCaskill, the freshman senator from Missouri who sits in Harry Truman's desk in the Senate and who has earned her own reputation as a straight-talker, went to Baghdad last week. She wanted to get a look at how we were spending the $2 billion that is gushing out of the Treasury each and every week for the war in Iraq.

snip//

"I think that, if there's any conclusions that I can draw about the contracting piece of this," McCaskill said in the call, "it's that in an effort to succeed in the military mission, there was an abdication of stewardship as it relates to the way that the money was spent, particularly as it relates to some of the contracts, both on reconstruction and in supporting our troops." In other words, we overpaid to win battles that we have not won. Money for nothing, IEDs for free.

Obviously, the war was not going that well militarily either. She said that all the troops she met with were proud of the work they are doing but, on the question of effectiveness, she was left with a "mixed bag" of reactions. "I think all of them were proud of the job they were doing and that certainly was my message to them, how proud we are of them in Missouri and in America," she said. "But, honestly, there were some that said, 'We need to get out. We're not doing any good over here. We need to get out immediately. We need to all get out.'"

McCaskill directly dismissed efforts by some to overdress the good news in Iraq. "I will tell you that anyone who has come over and spent time talking to the troops and comes home and says, 'They all think what we're doing is great and we need to stay here as long as it takes,' are not honestly talking to the troops," McCaskill says. "There are many of them at this point, especially those, I found, that have been deployed for the second or third time, that are very discouraged and do not believe that we are making meaningful progress in terms of what we're trying to accomplish over here."

snip//

September, when the generals and the the diplomats report on the "progress" of the surge, seems to be the agreed-upon 'High Noon, moment for the president, but there is no telling how hot it'll get in Washington this summer. Still, bringing the war to an end will likely require a visit from GOP senators to President Bush similar to the one Richard Nixon got from Hugh Scott and Barry Goldwater in the heated summer of 1974, when they told him the gig was up.

Meanwhile, McCaskill says that cleaning up the Iraq contracting mess, before and after the war ends, will take a while: "It's going to take a fairly long attention span," she said. "This isn't something that's going to be fixed by one press conference or by one change of command or by one change of one rule or procedure." She could just as easily have been talking about ending the war itself.