The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: It takes a great deal of courage to standwith only 300 men against 100,000. However, unlike the Spartans at theBattle of Thermopylae, the small group of men who goaded President Bushinto Iraq did so at no great personal sacrifice. As Bill Bonner explains,it is the common man who will suffer the greatest sacrifice of this War onTerror. Read on...300 CRETINSby Bill BonnerGo tell the Cretins, you who read;We took their orders, and are dead. - Based on inscription at Thermopylae, with apologiesThe Bush administration is hoping that the new film, 300, will give thetroop surge a lift with the public. The film glorifies the sacrifice of300 Spartan warriors who held back an invading army of over 100,000Persians in 480 B.C.Choosing their terrain well, the Spartans managed to neutralize much ofthe 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 theGreeks could see they were on the losing side of this fight. TheThespians, fighting alongside the Spartans, withdrew while the Spartansdecided to stay and fight to the last man. They might have done so as apurely military necessity, holding off the enemy so as to give theirallies time to retreat and regroup; or they might have fought on simplyfor 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 tooutflank his opponents. Then, the Persians got behind the Spartans andrained down arrows upon them until they were all dead.Leonidas’s body was recovered, beheaded and crucified. But the rest of thesurviving Greeks were then able to take up the fight; and, in a number ofcalamities and misadventures, the Easterners were finally driven backacross the straits to Asia Minor. Western civilization was saved.According to today’s neo-conservative apparatchiks, we are once againinvolved in an epic struggle - a clash of civilizations between the freeWest and the tyrannical East. Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, RichardPerle, Philip Zelikow - this handful of men (probably no more than 300 ofthem), 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 istoo late for earnest criticism; instead, the time has come for gratuitousridicule.The targets are many. For instance, against whom the war in Iraq is beingwaged (or why) has yet to be fully clarified. Every question on thesubject brings a response that only deepens the mystery.But the costs are becoming clearer every day. So far, Britain’s Ministryof Defense admits to having spent 5 billion pounds on the war in directcosts. Indirect costs are sure to be many times that figure. America’stotal is much larger - $505 billion of U.S. ‘taxpayers’ money’ has beenspent or approved. The biggest of all liar’s loans?Of course, we are already in the Land of Lies. Neither the Britishtaxpayer nor his American counterpart has any spare money; their taxeswere already earmarked for other boondoggles. Still, the U.S. Presidentasked 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 incapacitatedsoldiers, the whole thing is expected to cost more than $1 trillion.Since we’re tallying, we cannot fail to mention the cost in lives. 3,205U.S. soldiers have died, and 134 British soldiers. More than 24,000Americans have been seriously wounded. Iraqi casualties, if anyone iskeeping 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 becalled off, he seemed to warn. The politicians bent over and checked underthe cushions, but the spare change they recovered came nowhere close to$100 billion. They are already facing budget deficits of a half a trillionover the next two years. Where would the extra money come from? What wouldthe extra strain do to the finances of the nation...or to the value of thedollar? How was the investment expected to pay off? No one knew. No oneeven asked.But as for the strings, everyone knew exactly what the chief executive wastalking about -even the chief executive himself. Lawmakers have come tosee the war, not as a real war, but merely as just another spendingopportunity, with live ammunition. To the latest demand for cash, thepolls have attached a number of pork-barrel provisions, including $25million for spinach growers, $100 million for citrus growers, $74 millionfor peanut storage, $4 billion for ‘emergency payments’ to farmers, and$283 million for milk subsidies. Who says there isn’t progress in humanaffairs? The U.S. congress has managed to improve upon the old Romanformula - they’ve combined bread, circuses and war in a single spendingbill.Every war has its profiteers. Neither in love, nor in war do you stop tocount the costs. But a phony war is a bigger opportunity than most,because there is no patriotic necessity to win. Unlike the Spartans, theCretins know Iraq poses no real danger to the homeland. So everyone getsinto 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 onereport, truckers reported that they were asked to drive empty trucks backand forth across the desert, carrying sailboat fuel so that contractorscould bill the government for delivery. A total of $9 billion has beenofficially lost or unaccounted for.War critics will complain about the waste of money involved. They willpoint to this week’s polls, showing the war to be so ineffective that theaverage Iraqi now regards democracy with suspicion, and finds itacceptable to kill U.S. and British troops. The more the U.S. governmenttries to improve the lives of the Iraqis, the more Iraqis seem to want toget even. Given the deadly drift of things, wasted spending may turn outto be the best spending the Bush team did.“There will be good days and there will be bad days,” said the Americanpresident, stoically. And he’s right...but they won’t be shared outequally. The spinach growers, milk producers, and weapons contractors willget the good days. The poor grunts, the Iraqis and the taxpayers will getthe bad ones.But what about the Cretins? In the film, as in the battle, the Spartanswere wiped out. “Spartans. Tonight we dine in hell,” Leonidas was said toremark. Later, a shower of arrows so thick they blotted out the sun,according to Herodotus, came down on them. The Spartans fell; but Greecewas saved.We don’t know how far the parallels go. The U.S. military presence in Iraqhardly seems like 300 Spartans defending the homeland. Instead, it seemsmore like the Persian Empire invading someone else’s homeland.And the 300 Cretins? Are they really protecting western civilization? Wasit 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 inHell. [Ed. Note: If you would like to read more of the real story of the warbetween Greece and Persia, please refer to our very own book:The Essential Classicshttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/2251450106/dailyreckonin-20/Regards,Bill BonnerThe Daily Reckoning