September 19, 2005 - While we are giving our attention to the stories, possibly apocryphal, of rapes and murders in the Superdome; to images of corpses floating unattended in the septic waters of New Orleans streets; and the massive failure of government at every levels to serve and protect the citizens of the impacted Gulf Coast the counts of the dead and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to mount. The last published figures from Iraq are dated September 11th. That count showed that the American dead in Iraq numbered just three short of two thousand. The last published list from Afghanistan reached two-hundred thirty-three on September 9th.

While we were wondering how the President proposed to fund the more than $200 Billion cost of reconstructing the Gulf Coast our attention is diverted from the unfunded $4 Million a day he is already spending to patrol and reconstruct Iraq. While we watch the pundits pontificate on the deserved reputation of the damaged states for corruption and waste in public works projects we skip over the articles that detail the deficiencies, missing funds and padded payrolls of the American led reconstruction program in Najaf. The President has not addressed the question of how to pay for the devastation. He simply says that “it will cost what it costs”, a real profundity that does not come close to answering the question while he promises the greatest reconstruction effort in history – a program of social engineering that far exceeds any government program instituted by any previous administration.

As with the war and reconstruction in Iraq the President has no interest in how or by whom the bill for reconstructing New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will be paid. He has no interest in proposing a solution because he will be long gone from the White House by the time the bill comes due. George Bush won’t be President when the thirty-year bonds mature.
A US President who does take a longer view said this: “Every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan and our tax cuts. We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else. We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense."
Bill Clinton is right when he says that it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense – not if you care about the United States and its long term interests. It does not make sense if you look to the future of our children and their children after them. And it certainly doesn’t make sense as Rita sweeps across the Florida Keys and takes dead aim on Corpus Christie, Texas. Bill Clinton won’t be President when the thirty-year bonds come due either
In his first re-election campaign FDR told America that the Republicans “say that they will do every thing that we are doing; that they will do it better; they will do it faster and it won’t cost any money.” It doesn’t seem that the Republican Party has had a new idea in seventy years. It just doesn’t make sense.