Barack Obama used to rail against the use, and misuse, of supplemental funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Except now he’s submitted his own supplemental and it looks an awful lot like the Bush supplementals. Nathan Hodge details some of the more questionable items. Among them, four more F-22s — the last four ever produced if Obama has his way — to replace aircraft lost in operations. There’s some irony to the fact that Obama would stuff funding for the aircraft into a supplemental when the case against continued production rests almost entirely on the fact that the aircraft has never been used in either theater. Also in the supplemental: some $800 million for the Palestinian Authority ($556 million in Economic Support Funds, $125 million in Migration and Refugee Assistance, and $109 million in International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement funds). Keep in mind, we could have had another eight F-22s for that price. Which, even if you think the F-22 is useless, it can’t possibly be as useless as giving nearly a billion dollars to a corrupt and incompetent Palestinian Authority. The request includes $400 million for a new Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capabilities Fund and $806.2 million to upgrade the U.S. diplomatic facilities in Pakistan. That’s more than a billion dollars for Pakistan in the supplemental funding for ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That request may be entirely appropriate, but if this were a Bush supplemental I imagine the left would call it something like “stealth escalation.” And finally there’s $95 million “to provide Heavy Fuel Oil or equivalent to North Korea to support the goals of the Six Party Talks.” Note to rogue regimes: test a long-range rocket in defiance of international agreements and get a free $100 million pre-paid gas card.
