Recommendations 46 and 72

It was 4:30 AM. I had coughed myself awake and I could not sleep: another victim of flu season. So it was the perfect time to finish reading the Iraq Study Group (ISG) report. If you have not read it, I recommend it: 96 short pages of (mostly) straight talk about the mess over there. It may have been the fever, but two recommendations in particular stood out as unusual, going beyond the Iraq crisis. First, with almost no explanation, there was this little gem:

Recommendation 46:
The new Secretary of Defense should make every effort to build healthy civil-military relations, by creating an environment in which the senior military feel free to offer independent advice not only to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon but also to the President and the National Security Council, as envisioned in the Goldwater-Nichols legislation.

Wow... So we all knew the generals were under pressure to hold the party line when talking to Congress... but this recommendation states as clearly as a bipartisan panel would dare that Rumsfeld also prevented his generals from talking openly and honestly to George Bush and Condoleeza Rice (in her former job). I think I finally know why Rumsfeld got fired.

The second thing that caught my eye was not actually the text of Recommendation #72 (that Iraq war costs should be part of the regular annual budget, rather than "circumventing" the normal process with emergency supplemental appropriations) but rather the explanation for that seemingly modest recommendation.

[t]he executive branch presents budget requests in a confusing manner, making it difficult for both the general public and members of Congress to understand the requrest or to differentiate it from counterterrorism operations around the world or operations in Afghanistan. Detailed analyses by budget experts are needed to answer what should be a simple question: "How much money is the President requesting for the war in Iraq?"

The ISG report goes on to complain that the emergency supplemental appropriations are approved by "pressured" committees and the Congress after only "perfunctory review" and "minimum scrutiny." The result, says the report, is that, "the must-pass appropriations bill becomes loaded with with special spending projects that would not survive the normal review process." The report chides the administration for continuing to use supplemental appropriations, noting that, "the war is in its fourth year."

I am sure other Citizens were more astute, but I had not realized that Bush's insistence on conflating the war in Iraq with the war on terror, and his tactic of having "emergency" supplemental appropriations every year, served a real budgetary purpose for the Republicans: to use these wars as cover to grab even more pork. Makes you sick, doesn't it? Anyhow I just thought these two were worthy of special mention, as they have not, to my knowledge, been noted much elsewhere.