Funding wars

The only good thing that one can say about President Bush's war politicking is that it's so despicable and riddled with nonsense that it inspires a lot of fun-to-read criticism. Paul Krugman's op-ed today is one such piece of criticism. But one part of it struck me as perhaps a bit off:

What’s at stake right now is the latest Iraq “supplemental.” Since the beginning, the administration has refused to put funding for the war in its regular budgets. Instead, it keeps saying, in effect: “Whoops! Whaddya know, we’re running out of money. Give us another $87 billion.”

At one level, this is like the behavior of an irresponsible adolescent who repeatedly runs through his allowance, each time calling his parents to tell them he’s broke and needs extra cash.

What I haven’t seen sufficiently emphasized, however, is the disdain this practice shows for the welfare of the troops, whom the administration puts in harm’s way without first ensuring that they’ll have the necessary resources.

I say "perhaps" because I don't really know how wars are usually funded. This makes sense to me as a smart and safe way to ensure--when the president and the Congress are so at odds--that other Pentagon operations (whatever you think about them) don't get tied up in the dispute. Of course as Krugman notes Bush's motivations actually happen to be slipprier than that. He was funding the wars with supplementals when the Republicans controlled Congress, too.

But I don't quite see how the "practice" of funding wars with supplementals shows more disdain for the welfare of the troops per se. Why is this worse than lumping that funding in to the Pentagon budget? If anything, this actually gives the Congress--with its current makeup--a much cleaner referendum on the war every year than they'd otherwise have, doesn't it? What actually shows disdain for the troops, I'd say, is vetoing the funding wherever it comes from on the grounds that you want the war to continue so badly that you're willing to leave them in hostile territory as a means of strongarming the American public and the Congress into giving you the money.