Something less -- and something more -- than we bargained for

This cheery news greeted me this morning:

Cost of Iraq war nearly $2b a week
By Bryan Bender, Boston Globe Staff | September 28, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A new congressional analysis shows the Iraq war is now costing taxpayers almost $2 billion a week -- nearly twice as much as in the first year of the conflict three years ago and 20 percent more than last year -- as the Pentagon spends more on establishing regional bases to support the extended deployment and scrambles to fix or replace equipment damaged in combat....

Here's the rest.

That's right, we're laying out $2,000,000,000 a week, and what are getting for our money? According to a National Intelligence Estimate that Bush Inc. tried to keep us from seeing, we're creating more and more terrorists with each passing day.

I could be wrong -- Lord knows Bush Inc.'s floated so many justifications for the invasion and occupation of Iraq over the past three years that it's hard to keep them all straight -- but I'm pretty sure that further inflaming the jihadist movement for the purpose of creating a new and ever increasing crop of anti-US terrorists has not been floated as one of our primary goals (if I'm wrong about that, I'm sure someone will correct me).

But that's what we're getting, of course. That's the plain and simple truth. Which is, of course, why Dubya got mad when the NIE was leaked. The inept and corrupt administration has no greater enemy than the plain and simple truth, and they seek to stifle it at every opportunity.