Heres an idea: The U.S. should buy some of the weapons it left behind in Afghanistan from the Taliban and send them to Ukraine! haha Babylon Bee, please pick up the nearest white courtesy phone. Via: Libertarian Institute: The Joe Biden administration has come out in opposition to Congress creating an inspector generals office to []

The SIGUA office is opposed by President Biden but may be forced by a congressional vote

BY LEE FANG | JULY 12, 2023

The United States has allocated around $113 billion to Ukraine over the last seventeen months, soon to surpass the money spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II and quickly approaching the cost of twenty years of war and reconstruction in Afghanistan.

Despite this unprecedented spending, there is no overarching Special Inspector General to oversee the Ukraine funds to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

Change may be on the horizon. There will also be a vote this week, Rep. Tom Massey, R-Ky., tweeted this morning, on establishing the IG for Ukraine.

The push for a Special Inspector General for Ukraine Assistance (SIGUA) has unfortunately become a partisan issue, another casualty of the negative polarization cycle in Washington, D.C. Last March, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., attempted to establish the audit office as an amendment. The bill splintered the Republican caucus in half, while every Democratic Senator, except Sens. Jon Tester, D-Montana, and Jon Ossoff, D-Georgia, voted against it.

Surprisingly, notable opposition to establishing the office came from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Warren, before her rise to the Senate, became a national figure as an oversight official working alongside the SIGTARP, the auditor that oversaw the 2008 bank bailout funds. As Warren has touted in the past, SIGTARP, with relatively limited investigative resources, brought criminal charges against 144 individuals, obtained criminal convictions of 107 defendants, and obtained civil judgments and restitution totaling $4.3 billion.

The Afghanistan auditor, known as SIGAR, discovered even more breathtaking fraud and contractor abuse. The auditor found that U.S. Agency for International Development wasted $335 billion on a diesel power plant in the country that was over-budget and barely used, over $90 million on a program to place only 55 Afghan women in government jobs, and over $1 billion on ghost schools to build classrooms that were never utilized and left empty and dilapidated. The Pentagon reportedly spent $6 million on a project that imported nine Italian goats to boost Afghanistans cashmere market and $43 mil...

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Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose.  It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability.

From that upending, the alliance started bungling.  It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, in a 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia at least what was left of it ostensibly to protect the lives of Kosovar Albanians.  Far from dampening the tinderbox, the Kosovo affair continues to be an explosion in the making.

Members of the alliance also expended material, money and personnel in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, propping up a deeply unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul while failing to stifle the Taliban.  As with previous imperial projects, the venture proved to be a catastrophic failure.

In 2011, NATO again was found wanting in its attack on the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.   While it was intended to be an exemplar of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the intervention served to eventually topple the doomed Colonel Gaddafi, precipitating the de-facto partitioning of Libya and endangering the very civilians the mission was meant to protect.  A continent was thereby destabilised.  The true beneficiaries proved to be the tapestry of warring rebel groups characterised by sectarian impulses and a voracious appetite for human rights abuses and war crimes.

The Ukraine War has been another crude lesson in the failings of the NATO project.  The constant teasing and wooing of Kyiv as a potential future member never sat well with Moscow and while much can be made of the Russian invasion, no realistic assessment of the wars origins can excise NATO from playing a deep, compromised role.

The alliance is also proving dissonant among its members.  Not all are exactly jumping at the chance of admitting Ukraine.  German diplomats have revealed that they will block any current moves to join the alliance.  Even that old provoking power, the United States, is not entirely sure whether doors should be open to Kyiv.  On CNN, President Joe Biden expressed the view that he did not think its ready for membership of NATO.  To qualify, Ukraine would have to meet a number of qualifications from democratisation to a whole range of other issues.  While hardly proving very alert during the interview (at one point, he confused Ukraine with Russia) he did draw the logical conclusion that bringing Kyiv into an alliance of obligatory collective defence during current hostilities would automatically put NATO at war with Moscow.

With such a spotty, blood speckled record marked...