In June — after months of kicking and screaming — President Bush finally signed a war supplemental spending bill that included a doubling of GI Bill college benefits for veterans.

Bush’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), however, doesn’t seem too happy about the increased work these new benefits will create and plans to outsource it all. Last month, VA Secretary James Peake wrote to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union announcing the plan. From Peake’s letter, obtained by ThinkProgress:

The challenges of creating the procedures and systems to support a new program and ensuring accurate and timely benefit payments under this new program effective August 1, 2009, will tax VA’s resources. … Therefore, the decision has been made to seek private-sector support to implement this new program.

The government wants to automate all GI Bill requests and is looking to hire a private contractor to set up such a system. AFGE is condemning this decision, which would dump the expertise of 850 government employees who are able to process a veteran’s request for GI benefits within 20 days.

The VA is arguing that with this new outsourcing plan, benefits could be processed in minutes. Veterans advocates point to the Bush administration’s abysmal record in hiring contractors who have no expertise in the area they’re hired to work:

Marty Conatser, American Legion: “Our newest generation of veterans deserve the benefits administered by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, not outside contractors. Patients, critics and most media all cite the outstanding job the VA is doing. Outsourcing is not the answer.”

Rick Weidman, Vietnam Veterans of America: “If anything goes wrong, I’ll tell you what’ll happen, and it’s what always happens in these instances, is they’ll say, ‘Well, it’s not our job, it’s the VA’s.’ And the VA will say, ‘We can’t do anything, it’s contracted out. It’s the contractor’s job.’ And that is baloney. The problem isn’t the troops; the problem is the leadership.”

Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-AZ): “I just cannot believe that we’d ever allow this to happen. The level of service won’t be the same.”

So far, the Bush administration has treated this contracting process like it has so many others — with secrecy. As NPR reported today, the VA has so far “handpicked only a small number of companies to compete for the contract, and so far, officials won’t even reveal the companies’ names.”

Perhaps this move by the Bush administration is intended to take the agency one step closer to McCain’s dream of privatized veterans health care?

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein both have some good comments on this Newsweek interview with McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Schuenemann, whose shady history as a registered foreign agent, cog in the neoconservative war liberation machine, and shill for long cons has been covered in some depth on this blog. But there are a couple further comments that I want to highlight.

Scheunemann states that John McCain “recognizes there are certain people in the world who send children off to be suicide bombers or repress their citizens viciously whom you can’t use any word other than evil to describe.” That’s all fine, we know how conservatives get a huge charge out of calling various classes of people evil, but the point is, at least as regards McCain’s Iraq views, such people are only considered evil up until the moment when they decide to switch sides and ally with us against other evil people, at which point people like John McCain will, without batting an eye, stridently advocate giving our no longer-evil new allies millions of dollars to fight their still-evil former allies.

This is isn’t to suggest that paying one’s former enemies to fight one’s current enemies can’t be a wise tactical choice, it often is, just that when one was condemning one’s new allies as “evil terrorists” about five minutes ago, it tends to reveal one’s appeal to “moral clarity” as a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.

Speaking on McCain’s views on political progress in Iraq, Scheunemann says that McCain “has a realistic understanding of how you make peace“:

When you try to push parties that are unwilling to get together, you’re not going to have success. He’s said it’s important to keep moving forward, but we have to be realistic about the prospects.

Oops, sorry. Those are actually McCain’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, where he believes we must be “realistic about the prospects” for reconciliation, while doing all we can to prevent a Palestinian government dominated by Islamic extremists like Hamas.

Whereas in Iraq, McCain believes it’s important to be wildly optimistic about the prospects of reconciliation, while insisting that a government dominated by Islamic extremists like Da’wa and ISCI represents American victory.

As with majority of conservative commentary on Iraq over the last few months, Bush’s speech at the National Defense University today was almost completely focused on how much better things are now in Iraq than they were a year ago, with no substantive comment on the effects of the Iraq war on U.S. national security.

The reason for this is that, even in the most charitable interpretation, the U.S. military has been able suppress a fire which was allowed to rage out of control because of the incompetence of its commander in chief.

As the president recognized in his speech, the new reality in Iraq is largely the result of “the tribes in Anbar…growing tired of al Qaida’s brutality,” which “presented us with an opportunity to defeat al Qaida.” Let’s think about what this means: Because of the chaos created by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Al Qaeda was able to come in to Iraq (where they didn’t exist before) and carry on a years-long campaign of mass murder against Iraqi civilians, such that Iraqis eventually turned against Al Qaeda. To suggest that this represents any sort of policy success is to make a mockery of the English language.

In case you’d thought that the least five years had added any intellectual heft to the president’s worldview, here’s his description of the “ideological battle” which we are fighting in the Middle East:

We must show the people of the broader Middle East a better alternative to a life of violence and despair, and that alternative is freedom. History shows that people who are given the choice between freedom and tyranny will ultimately choose freedom. And history shows that freedom will yield the peace we all want.

Quite right. Likewise, people who are given the choice between a tray of freshly baked brownies and a kick in the groin will ultimately choose the brownies. But given the choice between a kick in the groin and multiple amputations, most would choose the kick in the groin. Similarly, given the choice between tyranny and chaos, most people would choose tyranny, which at least offers order. After five long years in Iraq, it’s staggering that Bush still insists on defending his Iraq policy with these sorts of simplistic choices. Of course we’d like other to live in freedom, but Bush gives no indication that he understands that this is more complicated than removing bad governments and installing good ones. Read more