George W. Bush might have been our best lesson ever

So, it turns out there's at least one major upside to George W. Bush's fiscal recklessness: Reuters reports that his successor -- having just suffered a $1.4 trillion deficit and spent the mammoth sum of $6.7 billion in Afghanistan in merely one summer month (June) -- sees prodigiously unattractive "budget implications," as the NY Times put it in a "Well, duh" moment, for any U.S. troop escalation.

Every which way the White House Office of Management and Budget cuts it, for every added troop we send to that war-torn sinkhole we also send along about a million taxpayer bucks, says OMB.

There's the soldier's pay, of course, but far more than that, there's everything that soldier will need while he or she is there: tanks, Humvees, planes, helicopters, replacement equipment, intelligence services to help stay alive, a place to dwell and modern roads to travel on. That sort of stuff.

The aggregate math, then, is fairly easy: send about 40,000 troops and we spend about $40 billion. That is, another $40 billion, each year -- or another $3.3 billion on top of June's $6.7 billion.

Maybe a little more -- in fact, maybe billions more -- but no less (although the Pentagon, rather predictably, disputes that). Indeed, the OMB's variable of $1 million per soldier is, the Times continues, roughly a "constant" -- which is to say, send fewer than 40,000 troops if you like, but each soldier will still consume $1 million a year; each will still need housing, passable roads, watchful intel, fuel-delivery costs of $400 a gallon (no kidding), and so on.

All that has the OMB eyeing a military budget that "could rise to as much as $734 billion, or 10 percent more than the peak of $667 billion under the Bush administration." On the other, intolerable hand, the Obama administration says it plans "to cut up to 5 percent at domestic agencies in fiscal 2011 as part of an effort to reduce the federal budget deficit."

You see the problem. And if the neocons don't, the boys at the White House political office do.

As do increasingly uneasy Democratic pols on Capitol Hill. David Obey, the House appropriations committee chairman, has complained that more troops will only suck the public treasury dry and "devour virtually any other priorities that the president or anyone in Congress had." And House defense-appropriations subcommittee chairman John Murtha said to the Times last week: "A month ago, I would have said 60 to 70" Democratic votes against a funding bill for troop escalation; but now, given the costs and renewed worries over Afghanistan's corruption, probably a majority of the 258 are against.

Hence, added Murtha, passage of a funding bill "depends on the Republicans."

Naturally, the GOP would be delighted to help.

Sounding like a domino-theory-obsessed Cold Warrior, and omitting that there are more Qaeda associates in Western Europe than there would be in Afghanistan, Republican Sen. Christopher Bond said that "If we have just a minimalist counterterrorism strategy, the Taliban will come back over the mountains from Pakistan, and they will be followed by their co-conspirators from the Al Qaeda organization."

So let's just pile in the doughboys -- George Bush and Chris Bond's deficit be damned; except, of course, in terms of domestic priorities. We had best watch our Ps and Qs there, because we sure wouldn't want to be fiscally reckless, now, would we.

But the Obama administration and this Democratic Congress could finally turn the fiscal tables on both the neoconservatives and their government-bathtub-drowning Norquistian allies. For the latter may finally have forced us to realize that we can't afford both guns and butter -- not indefinitely, which is an adverb that precisely describes any commitment in Afghanistan.

As a responsible player in a multipolar world, we can't withdraw to 1930s isolationism and shouldn't attempt some paleoconservative stab at a "Fortress America." Engagement -- whether in trade, international development, or collective security -- is an inescapable modern reality.

What we're lacking, however, and what we have lacked for decades, is a reenergized emphasis on nation-building at home -- which, fiscally speaking, would require a retreat from costly, hard-power, international encumbrances.

Perhaps, in the long run, George W. Bush's ultimate fiscal and foreign recklessness will have taught us just that.