Jack Keane is a retired US Army General who has played two important if questionable roles in the recent past. First, he is the so-called architect of Bush's latest strategy to prolong the Iraq war known as the 'surge.' He published a paper on the 'surge' in 2007 with the far right-wing think-tank American Enterprise Institute called 'Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.'

He is also close to Hillary Clinton. In a recent interview with the right-wing New York Sun, Keane said that Hillary Clinton supported the surge and would probably delay a large-scale troop withdrawal from Iraq, despite her campaign promise to get her military advisers together on day one to talk about troop redeployment within 60 days. Keane told the Sun that private conversations he had with Hillary Clinton prompted his views.

What is the 'surge' and is it a 'plan for success'? George W. Bush angered many Americans when instead of changing course in Iraq to bring the troops home in 2007 he chose to launch an escalation of the war that he called a 'surge.' The plan was to inject 30,000 new troops into Baghdad to beef up security and give Iraqis 'the political space' to develop a reconciliation plan that would end the civil war.

The not-so-public part of the plan was something a little more controversial. For those who follow the war closely, it was something of a surprise to hear Hillary Clinton in a fall presidential debate pronounce the 'surge' a success, 'especially in Al-Anbar Province.'

But Al-Anbar is not Baghdad. Surge troops were sent to the capital city. How could the surge be working in Al-Anbar? In January, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army General critical of the 'surge' and former Clinton administration appointee, told National Public Radio, 'The least important aspect of the so-called change in strategy was the ‘surge’.'

What George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton did not discuss in full detail is that the new goal in Al-Anbar was to provide US taxpayer funds to former insurgents to recruit them into unofficial paramilitary units known as 'awakening councils.'

In these councils, the ex-insurgents have been armed and trained and given an apparent incentive to side with the US military. Many former insurgents, some who had previously attacked US troops, joined the awakening councils for the cash and the guns. Many see the awakening councils as a means to build power in opposition to Iraq’s central government. And many stopped attacking US and Iraqi government troops, at least temporarily.

This past week, a wave of bombings in Iraq have brought the success of the 'surge' into question. Peace does not reign in Iraq. Violent incidents documented by the Pentagon as related to sectarian violence remain at about 4,000 per month, including a disturbing rise in violence against women since 2007. If proportioned for population, that level of violence would mean the US would see about 12,000 politically motivated violent incidents each month.

This was the success Clinton praised.

But is the 'surge' a plan for success or a plan for prolonged occupation? Up to January 2007 the US military essentially backed the Shiite-led factions in Baghdad. They were armed and given power over some of Iraq's resources and infrastructure. The factions formed a government to replace the occupiers, if they ever decided to leave. But, as we know, that strategy fueled a violent reaction and sectarian violence.

Now, instead of getting weapons from other sources in the region, the insurgent groups are being armed by the US, though they still have no incentive to trust the government of Iraq. Over the course of more than a year, no political agreement has been put into place that ends the sectarian conflict, the main aim of the 'surge.' Nor is the Bush administration making any efforts to broker one.

In fact, Bush administration geo-strategic aims in the Middle East are at odds with the Iraqi government-in-waiting. The Bush goal is, of course, securing control over oil resources, destabilizing Iran, establishing a military presence to counter Arab countries it situates in or close to the 'axis of evil,' and blocking access to the region by other major international powers.

As Robert Dreyfuss reports in a recent article in The Nation in an article titled 'Is Iran Winning the Iraq War?,' the initial Bush war plan put it into a strange de facto alliance with Iran. By boosting the Shiite factions, who are closely tied to Iran, the Bush administration helped promote political movements objectively unsympathetic with its ultimate goals.

In this light, the arming of tribal groups and factions hostile to the Baghdad regime makes more sense. But it in no way should be read as an effort at brokering peace. It should be seen for what it clearly is: laying the groundwork for long-term armed conflict in Iraq that pits US and US-backed forces more directly against Iranian backed forces. It is essentially a step toward the next war.

It is also in this light that Hillary Clinton’s votes in the Senate to authorize military force against Iran and her murky statement that “all options [against Iran] are on the table” should be read.

Some more critical observers than Hillary Clinton such as Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) have foreseen serious consequences to the 'surge' strategy. According to Webb, 'many Iraqis are suspicious of the motives of some of these groups, and there is growing concern that the US is in effect setting them up as private militias outside government control.'

Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor added that rather than generating the conditions for a political reconciliation this situation could result in entrenched sectarian conflict.

Macgregor told the media, 'We have facilitated, whether on purpose or inadvertently, the division of the country. We are capitalizing on that now, and we are creating new militias out of Sunni insurgents. We're calling them concerned citizens and guardians. These people are not our friends, they do not like us, they do not want us in the country. Their goal is unchanged.'

In other words, the 'surge' has been a recipe for fueling mistrust, the opposite of its publicly stated goal. It has been a roadblock, in fact, to achieving political stability.

Thus, George W. Bush is trying to foist a plan for permanent occupation on the Iraqi and American peoples. Republican nominee John McCain says he is all for it and is prepared to stay in Iraq 100 years. And Jack Keane now hints that Hillary Clinton might be prepared to go along with that.

A $3 Trillion War (a conservative estimate)

The war in Iraq has seriously harmed the US economy, argued a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz titled “The Iraq War Will Cost Us $3 Trillion, and Much More.” Thus, plans for extending the occupation cannot be separated from discussion about the deepening recession and finding the resources to pull ourselves out of it.

'The Iraq adventure,” Bilmes and Stiglitz write, “has seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go far beyond loose mortgage lending.'

Bilmes and Stiglitz remind us that the Bush administration overcame doubts about the war in 2002 and 2003 by pretending it would cost as little as $50 or $60 billion, going so far as to fire one adviser who let it slip that it might cost the astronomical sum of $100-$200 billion.

The administration claimed that Iraqi oil would pay the bill, winning votes from even a handful of congressional Democrats along the way.

Bilmes and Stiglitz prove, however, that the actual cost of war far exceeds the up-front costs set aside for war in spending supplementals, which alone total close to $600 billion.

The cost of war also includes the massive amounts added to the federal debt under the Bush administration, to date, the staggering sum of $1 trillion. The Bush people refused pay for the war up front and promoted tax cuts instead. It has simply been put on the credit card to be paid for by the next generation.

Write Bilmes and Stiglitz: Our vast and growing indebtedness inevitably makes it harder to afford new health-care plans, make large-scale repairs to crumbling roads and bridges, or build better-equipped schools. Already, the escalating cost of the wars has crowded out spending on virtually all other discretionary federal programs, including the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal aid to states and cities, all of which have been scaled back significantly since the invasion of Iraq.

In addition to this the necessary costs of caring for returning veterans with health care, job retraining and education, and retirement and disability benefits will add hundreds of billions to the price tag in direct costs and additional debt financing.

In the process, mired in recession and a desperate credit crunch, Wall Street is rapidly selling itself to the highest, even sometimes any bidder overseas.

Bilmes and Stiglitz further state: While Washington has been spending well beyond its means, others have been saving -- including the oil-rich countries that, like the oil companies, have been among the few winners of this war. No wonder, then, that China, Singapore and many Persian Gulf emirates have become lenders of last resort for troubled Wall Street banks, plowing in billions of dollars to shore up Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other firms that burned their fingers on subprime mortgages. How long will it be before the huge sovereign wealth funds controlled by these countries begin buying up large shares of other U.S. assets?

The economic downturn and the costs to recover from it will add another $1 trillion to US debt.

Bilmes and Stiglitz, in their closing, make a crucial point: As we head toward November, opinion polls say that voters' main worry is now the economy, not the war. But there's no way to disentangle the two. The United States will be paying the price of Iraq for decades to come. The price tag will be all the greater because we tried to ignore the laws of economics – and the cost will grow the longer we remain.

While the harm Bush’s war has inflicted on the people of Iraq is visible in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and a destroyed country racked by a civil war provoked by a foreign military presence, the damage to our own is just becoming clearer.

Jack Keane's relationship to Hillary Clinton has called into doubt her credibility on the war and has even positioned her as a potential 'stealth' pro-war candidate if public opinion trends that way.

In a time of economic crisis and with big plans for universal health care, reinvesting in the environment and the country’s infrastructure, protecting retirement security, and boosting public education there can be no waffling on ending Bush's $3 trillion war. Both Democratic candidates need to step up and talk about what Bush's war has cost this country and clarify their plans for bringing it to an end.