In the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle of March 18, Kathleen Pender’s regular column was headed, “Schooling Iraqi Children.” This heading promised some good reading.

Sure enough, it did. She tells us how the compassionate U.S. government intends to spend vast sums for educating Iraqi children. “Details are emerging at the same time California and other cash-strapped states are planning draconian cuts in education, health care and other services,” she reports. She suggests that our laid-off teachers learn Arabic and move to Iraq where the jobs will be.

The emerging details: Iraqi enrollment is to increase from 30 percent to 100 percent; books and other school supplies are to be provided to 4.1 million children; 25,000 schools will be revitalized—all within one year! The Pentagon planners are very clever.

If this sounds ambitious to you, just imagine accomplishing all of this with $100 million, which is our government’s estimated cost. This anticipated extravagance staggers the imagination: four million schoolbooks and desks; paper, pencils and chalk for four million students; fresh water, bathrooms and roofs for four million youngsters and their 250,000 teachers. All of this for twenty-five dollars each for the full year!

We all know what $25 is; it’s half a tank of gasoline. It is also 0.3 percent of what Americans pay for a student’s year of elementary education (and even that is half of what’s appropriate). But these days, President Bush and the newspapers deal in such monumental numbers that it is difficult to appreciate small numbers. Just consider how small—even microscopic—$100 million is as viewed by the State Department. $100 million runs the current war for half an hour or less.

$25 is sub-microscopic. This amount, which the U.S. State Department has allocated for a year’s education, is just a bit more than the cost of three .50 caliber machine gun bullets made with the infamous depleted uranium. An M2 machine gun fires $25’s worth of these armor piercing bullets in less than one half of one second; this is what a Pentagon desk jockey balances against a year’s education for an Iraqi child.

Is this a war for the Iraqi people? For liberty, justice and democracy? I don’t think so.