Claire McCaskill, the freshman senator from Missouri who sits in Harry Truman's desk in the Senate and who has earned her own reputation as a straight-talker, went to Baghdad last week. She wanted to get a look at how we were spending the $2 billion that is gushing out of the Treasury each and every week for the war in Iraq.
The former state auditor, who has been railing about the need for more congressional oversight since she got to Washington, returned from her visit lamenting the 'cost-plus' contracts that have enriched so many of the independent contractors doing business with the U.S. government in Iraq. Such contracts pay contractors a profit as a percentage of whatever the project costs.
She allowed that she had eaten in very nice mess halls, and wanted to assure her constituents that the troops were eating well. But "cost-plus is a dangerous contracting device," she insisted in a conference call with reporters from Kuwait, "because what cost-plus says to someone is, 'The more you spend, the more you make.' And that's a dangerous thing to do around public dollars."
With the cost of the war now projected to surpass a trillion dollars, I suspect we are not anywhere close to knowing exactly how dangerous it has gotten around our public dollars. As with all things Iraq, the safe bet is for matters to get worse before they get better.
"I think that, if there's any conclusions that I can draw about the contracting piece of this," McCaskill said in the call, "it's that in an effort to succeed in the military mission, there was an abdication of stewardship as it relates to the way that the money was spent, particularly as it relates to some of the contracts, both on reconstruction and in supporting our troops." In other words, we overpaid to win battles that we have not won. Money for nothing, IEDs for free.
Obviously, the war was not going that well militarily either. She said that all the troops she met with were proud of the work they are doing but, on the question of effectiveness, she was left with a "mixed bag" of reactions. "I think all of them were proud of the job they were doing and that certainly was my message to them, how proud we are of them in Missouri and in America," she said. "But, honestly, there were some that said, 'We need to get out. We're not doing any good over here. We need to get out immediately. We need to all get out.'"
McCaskill directly dismissed efforts by some to overdress the good news in Iraq. "I will tell you that anyone who has come over and spent time talking to the troops and comes home and says, 'They all think what we're doing is great and we need to stay here as long as it takes,' are not honestly talking to the troops," McCaskill says. "There are many of them at this point, especially those, I found, that have been deployed for the second or third time, that are very discouraged and do not believe that we are making meaningful progress in terms of what we're trying to accomplish over here."
Truman once tried to minimize his reputation as a confrontational rabble-rouser by denying his nickname Give 'em Hell Harry. He said "I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell." McCaskill plans to seek a series of hearing on the contracting practices that are likely to be a little hellish for some people at the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department. In this too she will be following in the footsteps of Truman, whose famous Senate hearings during the 1940s investigated World War II military contract abuses.
Democrats have been taking heat lately because the focus has shifted from the war to other issues, like immigration and energy. But Iraq is not going away, and party leaders are aware of that. Majority Leader Harry Reid opened the Senate Thursday by noting the latest disaster to befall American soldiers in Iraq, 14 killed in two days. After the energy bill and the immigration debate is reprised this weekend, the Senate will move on to the funding authorizing bill for the Pentagon. That will return Iraq to the forefront of the debate, and put the administration back on the defensive.
After taking heat from their base for not standing up to the president last month when he vetoed an emergency spending bill that included withdrawal timetables, Democrats are set to send him a Department of Defense bill that will again include similarly controversial language. They plan to gauge how much GOP support the president has lost in the interim, with the thought that, sooner or later, the White House will not have enough support to forestall a veto override.
September, when the generals and the the diplomats report on the "progress" of the surge, seems to be the agreed-upon 'High Noon, moment for the president, but there is no telling how hot it'll get in Washington this summer. Still, bringing the war to an end will likely require a visit from GOP senators to President Bush similar to the one Richard Nixon got from Hugh Scott and Barry Goldwater in the heated summer of 1974, when they told him the gig was up.
Meanwhile, McCaskill says that cleaning up the Iraq contracting mess, before and after the war ends, will take a while: "It's going to take a fairly long attention span," she said. "This isn't something that's going to be fixed by one press conference or by one change of command or by one change of one rule or procedure." She could just as easily have been talking about ending the war itself.
