Bush's Madness in Mesopotamia

The Bush Administration’s announcement of a $20 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia makes about as much sense as giving a heart patient a bucket of fried chicken. Sure, a big arms deal with the Saudi sheiks is a nice way to recycle all those petro profits to American contractors that make up what’s left of Bush’s base. But selling our shaky allies a smorgasbord of weaponry is only going to make a volatile region even more unstable. Of course, the fact that we’re sending arming the Sunni Arabs in Saudi Arabia is symptomatic of the fact that our invasion of Iraq has inadvertently backfired to the advantage of the Persian Shiites in Iran.

The Washington Post, incidentally, is reporting that the Pentagon cannot account for 30% of the weapons it has handed over to the Iraqi government. As one expert put it, this "likely means that the United States is unintentionally providing weapons to bad actors." The fact that the U.S. military is battling forces supplied by U.S. taxpayers – the U.S. has spend nearly $20 billion supplying Iraqi security forces – puts a new twist on the administration’s banal old cliché that as “The Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.” Can there be any doubt that Bush is to the war on terror what Inspector Clousseau is to law enforcement?

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