“Although the Democrats are very uncomfortable with the way the Iraq policy is being executed, they are at pains not to appear that they are shortchanging troops in the field,” Loren Thompson, CEO of the Lexington Institute, yet another “think tank,” this one connected at the hip to the neocon infested Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Associated Press. “This is their opportunity to show that they, too, are pro-defense,” that is to say pro-killing Iraqis in prodigious numbers with an inventory of truly heinous weapons.

In order to test the loyalty to the neocon ethic of ever ballooning “defense” (i.e., invade small countries) appropriations, the “Bush administration is hammering out its largest-ever appeal for more Iraq war funds—a record $100 billion, at least, and that figure reflects cuts from wish lists originally circulating around the Pentagon,” a “wish list” no different than one submitted by a heroin addict, forever increasing his dosage and thus requiring more and more money, to the ultimate ruination of family and friends.

The neocon-haunted Pentagon is bankrupting America. In 2006, the Pentagon spent around $120 billion killing Iraqis and wrecking their country, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Next year, they estimate they will need $200 billion to sustain the same level of terrorism.

Not a problem for Democrats.

“Despite widespread discontent over the Iraq war and President Bush’s handling of it, Democrats are expected to grant the vast majority of the request. Yet evidence is accumulating that the figure the White House sends to Capitol Hill will not be limited to dollars critically needed for troops and war-fighting,” the Associated Press continues. “There is much sentiment among Democrats to protect troops and fear about being portrayed as unsympathetic to men and women in uniform. These factors probably would overwhelm any efforts by anti-war Democrats to use the debate over the Iraq money to take on Bush’s conduct of the war.”

In short, don’t expect any significant changes while Democrats are in the saddle. In fact, Democrats represent nothing more than a few minor changes in the management team.

“Democrats want to win the war, which is why we want to change the strategy,” Chuckie Schumer declared after fusty neocon apologist Elizabeth Dole attacked Democrats as soft on spending outrageous amounts of taxpayer money on killing Iraqis and wrecking their country. “He said if Democrats gain the majority in the Senate, they would push for new policies including withdrawing troops for deployment elsewhere and adding forces for counterterrorism such as pursuing Osama bin Laden,” the Associated Press reported two days before the midterm elections.

Of course, as we know, and as the Iraq Study Group of neolib and neocon insiders recommended, the U.S. military will be in Iraq at least until 2008. Call it Iraqization, as the “US role would change from leading the fight against insurgents and terrorism to supporting Iraqi government forces in the conflict,” according to the Washington Post.

Obviously, the neocons and their complaisant, even eager, Democrat collaborators are looking to make to make the duration of the “war” twice as long as World War 2.

Naturally, come 2008, there will be yet another excuse issued by a “study group” of neolibs and former Iran-Contra criminals to keep our “men and women in uniform” on the ground in Iraq, that is if they are not killed off in large numbers after the neocons attack Iran and our soldiers are hemmed in by incensed Iranians.

In the meantime, Democrats have to keep up appearances.

“It won’t just be a rubber stamp on what they give us,” Kirsten Brost, spokeswoman for the incoming chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. David Obey, told the Associated Press.

Prior to the election, neocons and Israel Firsters worried mightily Obey, as chair of the Appropriations Committee, would cut the budgets of both the Pentagon and Israel. “Military aid is key to Israel’s ability to defend itself,” the Jewish Press reported in October. “Will Obey cut aid to Israel, as he has already voiced a desire to do (over the settlements issue)? Will he try to cut funding for military programs that create high-tech weapons? These are the very defense items we supply Israel with and that give the Jewish state a qualitative edge over foes that vastly outnumber it.” Such foes include malnutritioned and impoverished Palestinians, cut off from the outside world in their open-air gulag, the largest in the world.

It is said Obey is a “supporter of the policies of the more dovish Labor Party in Israel,” although there are thousands and thousands of Palestinians that would dispute this alleged difference.

Dave knows AIPAC can make or break congressional career choices, even though Obey has been in Congress since Moses brought down the stone tablets. Naturally, both the Pentagon and Israel do not face liquid diets, imposed by Dave Obey or any other Democrat.

In fact, when it comes to the Pentagon, Obey may suffer from the same malady as his Republican predecessor. Like a spendaholic, shop-til-you-drop junkie at the mall, “Congress doesn’t seem to know how much it appropriated” for the “war,” according to Winslow T. Wheeler, the director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information in Washington. “DOD’s supplemental budget requests and the monthly obligation reports issued by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service often do not provide enough detail to determine how … funds for operations in Iraq and the war on terrorism have been obligated,” as there are “deficiencies in DOD’s financial management systems and business processes, the use of estimates instead of actual cost data, and the lack of adequate supporting documentation.”

But cronyism and no-bid contracts lost in the documentary sauce are not enough for the Pentagon. Now, acting in predictable fashion for an insatiable corporatized leviathan, the Pentagon is expanding its operations, sort of like the Mafia expands its street level operations.

“The Pentagon increasingly is using war spending bills for costs not directly related to Iraq and Afghanistan. Last month, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England said the four military services could add projects connected to the broader fight against terrorism, which critics said could be interpreted to cover almost anything.”

As we know, the “fight against terrorism” now includes, under Section 802 of the Patriot Act, virtually any domestic crime, once the responsibility of local police, who are now essentially deputized by the federal government to fight against the amorphously defined category of terror, most of it created by the Pentagon, CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, Britain’s MI6, and a host of other nefarious organizations.

“Democrats have not been shy about adding money not sought by the president to war bills. Most notably, the Senate in August included $13 billion for Army and Marine Corps combat readiness in a Pentagon budget measure that had $70 billion in Iraq.” As an example of how the Pentagon spreads around clueless taxpayer wealth—or, more accurately, borrows money and sends the bill to the taxpayer—consider that an FY 2005 DOD House Appropriations request included $8.5 billion “in preparation for initial deployment of missile defenses,” the is to say a vastly expensive boondoggle contrived by death merchants.

It does not matter this scam was rendered completely and utterly ineffectual the previous year by Russia’s SS-27 Topol-M road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile. But then defense is not the issue here, endless profit is.

Of course, a mere $8.5 million is peanuts when stacked up against the $3.3 trillion gone missing from the Pentagon. “We are overhauling our financial management system,” declared Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim in 2003, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and now VP of Booz Allen Hamilton, connected at the hip with NORAD and USNORTHCOM. “If his position was Chief Financial Officer of a major corporation, Zakheim would be charged with criminal conspiracy, negligence and thousands of counts of fraud,” notes Uri Dowbenko. As to be expected, the enronization of corporate operations is well underway, but we will leave that for another blog entry.

Maybe this mysterious disappearance of truckloads of money has something to do with the neocons.

“Zakheim, known as a conservative thinker on defense and national security issues, was invited, in 1999, to serve on the ‘Vulcans’, a volunteer team of foreign policy experts that advised then Texas Governor George W. Bush on international affairs,” writes Caryn Litt. Of course, “Vulcan” is shorthand for perfidious neocon, and, as we know, these folks not only “advised then Texas Governor George W. Bush on international affairs,” but took over foreign and military affairs lock, stock and barrel upon Bush’s appointment to office, thanks to a gaggle of reactionaries politely known as the Supreme Court.

Not that Dov Zakheim is likely worried about getting busted, as he is a dual U.S.-Israel citizen, that is to say if things get too hot, Dov can jump on a plane and fly to Israel and pull a Marc Rich. Of course, if he does get in trouble, Bush could always pardon Zakheim, the same way Bill Clinton, otherwise known as the Bush crime family’s “other son,” pardoned Rich. Some people are less guilty than others.

At any rate, if you believe chaste Democrats will enter Congress next year and clean house, you may as well wish for a chartreuse pony.

As well, the “war” will drag on in Iraq, albeit with a spanking new cosmetic face job and a healthy dose of PR spin, thanks in part to the work of the Iraq Study Group.

It has nothing to do with our “men and women in uniform,” as they are, as Kissinger quipped, “just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” No, Iraq is emblematic “of a very old and familiar map of war and conquest, across the Middle East and Eurasian subcontinent,” as Larry Chin writes. “It is no surprise to note that the Iraq Study Group agenda comes at the same time that one of its original members, former CIA Director Robert Gates, has been tapped by Bush-Cheney as the new Secretary of Defense, and new Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in one of her very first act as the new Speaker, consults with Zbigniew Brzezinski.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a consummate insider, same as James Baker and Lee Hamilton, and the terms Democrat and Republican, merely superficial labels, are irrelevant, strictly for the dog and pony show known as American “mainstream” politics.

In short, Nancy Pelosi is dancing will the Devil, as should be expected.

Brzezinski, a former director of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee to the Trilateral Commission, works closely with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an organization that has war criminal Henry Kissinger, CFR member Brent Scowcroft (who coined the term “New World Order,” as Bush Senior never had an original thought in his life), and the neocon James “World War Four” Woolsey on its board of trustees.

Expect more the same.