BUSH LIED AGAIN: THE McCAIN ESCALATION PLAN IS TWICE AS BIG AND FIVE TIMES AS EXPENSIVE AS HE CLAIMED

You've probably heard all the proponents of escalating the war-- the McCains, Cheneys, Kagens, Liebermen...-- whining that Bush isn't sending enough new troops into the midst of the Iraq Civil War. Looks like they're getting their way-- or that Bush was lying about his intentions the whole time. Bush? Lie?

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office shows that the actual troop increase Bush is looking for is almost 50,000 troops, not 21,500. Bush? Lie?

See, Bush was just talking about the 21,500 who would be on the front line fighting. Noah Schactman at DefenseTech explains that there are also support troops needed for the escalation Bush is implementing (implementing while Biden, Levin, Hagel, Warner and the rest argue over wording on a nonbinding symbolic sense-of-the-Senate resolution that Bush and Cheney have already publicly stated they will ignore). Bush somehow forgot to mention "personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services."


When Bush fed the public the latest in the pack of lies he has never ceased spouting, he claimed his little "surge" would cost us another $5.6 billion. The CBO says the very least it will cost to fund Bush's plans are $9 billion and a far more realistic figure exists somewhere between $13 billion and $27 billion. That's on top of the half trillion he's already wasted over there. (I shouldn't say "over there," since much of it has gone right into the pockets of his biggest campaign contributors over here. When Roosevelt and Truman were fighting and winning a real war, they called that "war profiteering" and they led the fight against it, instead of directing it, the way Bush and Cheney do.)

And that doesn't even take into account Bush's creeping expansion of the war into Iran. Sean Paul has a great analysis over at The Agonist today. Although the Bush Regime announced this morning that the plans to release the so-called "evidence" of Iran's meddling has been delayed, they're going ahead with the hostility required to provoke them into taking the kind of action Bush needs to attack. Nothing, short of impeachment, will keep him from starting a war with Iran.