The Bush campaign has been blasting John Kerry for refusing to vote last year for a bill that authorized a supplemental $87 billion for the Iraq War.

In fact, of course, while much of that money was for the military, and thus, in the minds--if such a term can be applied here--of Bush backers "for supporting the troops," $18 billion of it was supposedly for Iraq reconstruction. And it was because there was so little in the way of monitoring and bidding in place for the allocation of this huge sum of money that Kerry and some other Democratic senators balked (you can’t vote for part of a bill in the Senate--it’s all or nothing).

Now we learn, once again, that in fact virtually none of that $18 billion has been spent anyhow. Despite the fact that Iraqis have been suffering without water, without sewage treatment plants, and without electricity since the war began, the Bush administration and the occupation authorities have spent only $1 billion on reconstruction, according to a report in the N.Y. Times.

Incredibly, this is the same pathetic amount that had reportedly been spent over six months ago, suggesting that in the intervening months, almost nothing has been done to rebuild the infrastructure that the U.S. destroyed during its invasion of Iraq and through the sanctions it enforced over the prior decade--and that it continues to destroy daily.

As for the balance of that money--that's the $69 billion supposedly "for the troops"--reports from soldiers in Iraq, and occasionally surfacing in the media, would suggest that a lot of that money has not been spent either--at least not on them. While Iraqi insurgents seem to have all the munitions they need, on the U.S. side there are shortages in Iraq of bombs, bullets, body armor, spare parts for mechanized equipment--the list goes on and on.

If the current Congress were not in the hands of Republicans, there would almost certainly have already been aggressive investigations into war profiteering and into the bureaucratic inefficiencies which have seen so much of this incredible sum of money either languishing in Pentagon accounts, getting secretly shuffled around into unauthorized expenditures preferred by the Bush administration, or simply pilfered.

It is nothing short of astonishing that an administration that claims it is trying to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis has for over a year been unwilling or unable to spend any of the money allocated by Congress for exactly that purpose.

If the people running John Kerry's lackluster campaign had an ounce of sense, they'd be moving on from the nonsensical and largely irrelevant focus on his and George Bush's Vietnam era records, and blasting Bush for the incompetence and corruption that have fatally infected and doomed his splendid little war. Instead of mind-numbing nuanced explanations about his reasons for voting for a war authorization but against the $87-billion war allocation to help pay for it, Kerry should be loudly decrying the way that money has been misused, misspent and misplaced, and saying, "I told you so!"

Meanwhile, progressive and even nominally Democratic voters who understandably may be less than enthusiastic about Kerry, as well as third party voters, should at least recognize the importance of getting to the polls to vote for Democratic senate and house candidates. The magnitude of the Bush disasters--military, environmental, lab or, civil rights and liberties, judicial, educational etc.--would have been far less had even one house of Congress been in the hands of an opposition party.

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