Tommy Denton

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Pity President Bush and the members of Congress as they finagle a way to deal constructively with the Iraq unpleasantness.

After the president's successful veto last week of a $120 billion supplemental appropriation bill to continue funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus some additional support for such things as veterans health care and Hurricane Katrina, Congress now is seeking a solution acceptable to Bush.

Republican supporters of the president had decried the attempt by Democrats to hamstring the commander in chief with such nuisances as specified goals for withdrawing U.S. troops, and Democrats still fume about the president's insistence on a "blank check" to proceed without anything resembling the requisite checks and balances.

A few more clear-eyed realists who recognize a speed-gaining disaster when they see one know that some reasonable compromise will be necessary to mitigate the grotesque damage already done to U.S. lives and national credibility and prestige, not to mention the treasury.

Moderate U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told the Los Angeles Times last week that although Bush wants "a straight funding bill with no benchmarks, no conditions, no reports ... many of us, on both sides of the aisle, don't see that as viable."

Late last week, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., proposed to withdraw authority to conduct military operations in Iraq by the fifth anniversary of the original grant of authority, Oct. 11.

Even Virginia's Republican Sen. John Warner could not escape the logic. Warner floated the idea some weeks ago -- quietly, and after Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware did so in January -- of withdrawing the president's authority to wage war because Congress, in granting that authority in 2002, had not anticipated the prospect of U.S. troops trapped in the crossfire of a civil war.

Yet, well into the fifth year of that unanticipated prospect, most Americans seem not to understand the ad hoc nature of how they've been paying for the war. Nearly $500 billion has been appropriated through what are called supplemental appropriations bills, separate and apart from the budget for the Defense Department.

A curious taxpayer might wonder why she's been paying to support the current $500 billion defense budget even as money to finance the two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to an extremely pricey add-on, the proceeds gathered either by raiding other parts of the federal budget or by borrowing.

Part of the answer to where the "normal" defense budget goes, though exempt from having to actually help pay for the war, lies in programs jealously guarded by defense contractors and their sycophants on Capitol Hill. That confederacy helps protect expensive but obsolete weapons systems, lucrative no-bid contracts and other forms of rapacious entrepreneurship favored by the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Complaints of waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon have echoed vainly for decades. Even the libertarian Cato Institute has estimated defense waste to be in excess of $100 billion.

U.S. Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., has introduced legislation to transfer $60 billion in waste from the defense budget -- primarily from the inertia of weapons systems like the F-22 fighter -- without compromising military readiness, and doing great good in the bargain.

According to retired Vice Adm. Jack Shanahan, in an essay for MinutemanMedia.org, $60 billion would allow the federal government to provide health insurance for all uninsured American children; feed 6 million children abroad; retrain 250,000 U.S. workers who lost their jobs to outsourcing; rebuild deteriorating American schools over 10 years; augment the federal homeland security budget; increase research in alternative energy sources; and boost funding for veterans health and medical research.

That $60 billion would finance all the above, Shanahan said, and still have $5 billion left to apply to retiring the national debt.

Given the toxic atmosphere in Washington, as rhetorical duels rage between the White House and Congress over surges, benchmarks and other turf-protecting evasions, Woolsey will have trouble getting the fulminating adversaries to listen to her.

Of course, critics will charge that Woolsey's harming the war effort. After five years of being embroiled in a venture that remains a pluperfect strategic disaster, "harming" that war effort by holding this administration accountable for its grim failures has become a patriotic duty.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.