300 CRETINS

by Bill Bonner

Go tell the Cretins, you who read;
We took their orders, and are dead.
- Based on inscription at Thermopylae, with apologies

The Bush administration is hoping that the new film, 300, will give the
troop surge a lift with the public. The film glorifies the sacrifice of
300 Spartan warriors who held back an invading army of over 100,000
Persians in 480 B.C.

Choosing their terrain well, the Spartans managed to neutralize much of
the Persians advantage; while the Persians had many, many more troops,
they could only get a few of them to the line of battle at a time. But the
Greeks could see they were on the losing side of this fight. The
Thespians, fighting alongside the Spartans, withdrew while the Spartans
decided to stay and fight to the last man. They might have done so as a
purely military necessity, holding off the enemy so as to give their
allies time to retreat and regroup; or they might have fought on simply
for the glory of it. We don't know.

We do know that they managed to hold their ground for a couple more days,
until a fellow Greek, Ephialties, betrayed them by showing Xerxes how to
outflank his opponents. Then, the Persians got behind the Spartans and
rained down arrows upon them until they were all dead.

Leonidas's body was recovered, beheaded and crucified. But the rest of the
surviving Greeks were then able to take up the fight; and, in a number of
calamities and misadventures, the Easterners were finally driven back
across the straits to Asia Minor. Western civilization was saved.

According to today's neo-conservative apparatchiks, we are once again
involved in an epic struggle - a clash of civilizations between the free
West and the tyrannical East. Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard
Perle, Philip Zelikow - this handful of men (probably no more than 300 of
them), pushed a bright, shining war on a dim yahoo of a president.
Together, they see themselves like Leonidas at the Pass of Thermopylae,
guarding our western way of life, without even getting their suits dirty.
The sacrifice of others is worthwhile, they believe.

But now, after four years with neither victory nor defeat in hand, it is
too late for earnest criticism; instead, the time has come for gratuitous
ridicule.

The targets are many. For instance, against whom the war in Iraq is being
waged (or why) has yet to be fully clarified. Every question on the
subject brings a response that only deepens the mystery.

But the costs are becoming clearer every day. So far, Britain's Ministry
of Defense admits to having spent 5 billion pounds on the war in direct
costs. Indirect costs are sure to be many times that figure. America's
total is much larger - $505 billion of U.S. 'taxpayers' money' has been
spent or approved. The biggest of all liar's loans?

Of course, we are already in the Land of Lies. Neither the British
taxpayer nor his American counterpart has any spare money; their taxes
were already earmarked for other boondoggles. Still, the U.S. President
asked for another $100 billion of it on Monday, and is expected to request
$140 billion more for 2008, bringing the total to over $700 billion.
Looking ahead, to the cost of caring for wounded and incapacitated
soldiers, the whole thing is expected to cost more than $1 trillion.

Since we're tallying, we cannot fail to mention the cost in lives. 3,205
U.S. soldiers have died, and 134 British soldiers. More than 24,000
Americans have been seriously wounded. Iraqi casualties, if anyone is
keeping score, may top half a million.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush asked Congress for the latest $100 billion draw,
without strings and without delay - or else the war might have to be
called off, he seemed to warn. The politicians bent over and checked under
the cushions, but the spare change they recovered came nowhere close to
$100 billion. They are already facing budget deficits of a half a trillion
over the next two years. Where would the extra money come from? What would
the extra strain do to the finances of the nation...or to the value of the
dollar? How was the investment expected to pay off? No one knew. No one
even asked.

But as for the strings, everyone knew exactly what the chief executive was
talking about -even the chief executive himself. Lawmakers have come to
see the war, not as a real war, but merely as just another spending
opportunity, with live ammunition. To the latest demand for cash, the
polls have attached a number of pork-barrel provisions, including $25
million for spinach growers, $100 million for citrus growers, $74 million
for peanut storage, $4 billion for 'emergency payments' to farmers, and
$283 million for milk subsidies. Who says there isn't progress in human
affairs? The U.S. congress has managed to improve upon the old Roman
formula - they've combined bread, circuses and war in a single spending
bill.

Every war has its profiteers. Neither in love, nor in war do you stop to
count the costs. But a phony war is a bigger opportunity than most,
because there is no patriotic necessity to win. Unlike the Spartans, the
Cretins know Iraq poses no real danger to the homeland. So everyone gets
into the spirit of the war as it really is.

Halliburton, Lockheed, and Bechtel inflate prices, take money for nothing,
and gouge taxpayers for useless weapons and unnecessary supplies. In one
report, truckers reported that they were asked to drive empty trucks back
and forth across the desert, carrying sailboat fuel so that contractors
could bill the government for delivery. A total of $9 billion has been
officially lost or unaccounted for.

War critics will complain about the waste of money involved. They will
point to this week's polls, showing the war to be so ineffective that the
average Iraqi now regards democracy with suspicion, and finds it
acceptable to kill U.S. and British troops. The more the U.S. government
tries to improve the lives of the Iraqis, the more Iraqis seem to want to
get even. Given the deadly drift of things, wasted spending may turn out
to be the best spending the Bush team did.

"There will be good days and there will be bad days," said the American
president, stoically. And he's right...but they won't be shared out
equally. The spinach growers, milk producers, and weapons contractors will
get the good days. The poor grunts, the Iraqis and the taxpayers will get
the bad ones.

But what about the Cretins? In the film, as in the battle, the Spartans
were wiped out. "Spartans. Tonight we dine in hell," Leonidas was said to
remark. Later, a shower of arrows so thick they blotted out the sun,
according to Herodotus, came down on them. The Spartans fell; but Greece
was saved.

We don't know how far the parallels go. The U.S. military presence in Iraq
hardly seems like 300 Spartans defending the homeland. Instead, it seems
more like the Persian Empire invading someone else's homeland.

And the 300 Cretins? Are they really protecting western civilization? Was
it worth the billions spent and the thousands of corpses? We don't know,
but we have a feeling that there is already a table reserved for them in
Hell.