George W. is now asking for more money to fund the Iraq war. I was just listening to him on Countdown making it seem as thought Congress doesn’t really support our troops as they fight him on every spending and supplemental spending bill. He comes off as so self righteously indignant that anyone could ever deny our troops money for the equipment they need.

The thing is, BILLIONS of dollars have been lost, mismanaged, or otherwise unaccounted for since the illegal invasion of Iraq. Thousands of weapons and munitions have disappeared and the recipients of extraordinarily large government contracts (Halliburton anyone?) have failed to account for large portions of their expenditures.

The president balked at insuring this nation’s CHILDREN because of the price tag, 35 billion dollars over 5 years for 10 million kids. He apparently has no such concerns about throwing millions more away to corporate thieves and incompetents.

This morning MSN news ran this article, it seems that the group who was supposed to train and provide equipment for Iraqi police officers somehow cannot account for MOST of the money they received, over 1.2 BILLION dollars. In fact, DynCorp’s accounting books were in such a mess that the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction couldn’t even finish the evaluation. The State Department asked them to come back at the end of the year once they get things more organized. To defend themselves the State Department agreed that they could not reconcile the accounting for the period of February 2004-October 2006 and that it would “take three to five years” to “fully review and validate invoices” for that period; however, they had made significant improvements from October 2006 on.

On top of this, it was revealed earlier in the year that DynCorp had purchased hundreds of trailers for Baghdad that were still sitting in storage years later. They also spent 4.2 MILLION dollars on “unauthorized work” this included an Olympic sized swimming pool in Iraq and guess who paid for it? Yup, tax paying US citizens, how nice.

MSN News ran this story in February of this year detailing how federal auditors had found 10 BILLION dollars of wasted or unaccounted for money in Iraq. (This includes the millions spent on DynCorp’s swimming pool and unused trailers.)

And who can forget the 100 MILLION dollars that went missing from Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority? Or the 9 BILLION dollars Bremr’s group awarded to Iraqi ministries that is unaccounted for? What is sad about these “oversights” is that it was Iraqi money trusted to the US to handle transparently for the good of Iraq reconstruction.

Recently we heard about the thousands of weapons to disappear in Iraq, 190,000 AK-47′s and pistols to be exact. In 2005 the UN issued a report that revealed 109 sites of “material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles” had these things taken from them. Although they couldn’t track where the weaponry had gone they were able to tell that most of the items taken could be used to make chemical weapons or missiles. In fact, 85% of the equipment to make missiles was missing.

So, not only are we engaged in an illegal war killing innocent Iraqis and our soldiers, we are padding the pockets of US corporations with illegal incompetent handling of contracts. This isn’t news to those of us who are paying attention. It is however, something that a many Americans don’t realize. When Bush/Cheney uses their same rhetoric of fear and persuasion insisting that the Democrats are horribly unpatriotic for not funding the troops it works on the American people. They hear the lip service they become indignant they want money sent to their troops!

The question is now how do we get America to wake up to what their taxes are really going to and demand that this president’s strategy, accountability, and role be changed? We need to demand that this administration explain exactly why the troops don’t already have the equipment that they need, especially in light of the waste that is occurring exponentially in Iraq. The democrats, despite heavy pressure from their base to stop funding, have approved every bill for funding of the war for fear of causing our troops more danger.

The answer isn’t to throw more money in this quagmire, it’s to demand accountability for what is there now and ensure that our troops are getting what they need ahead of anything else (like swimming pools, hotel stays, and unused trailers).