President Bush is trying to score unearned points for fiscal rectitude by railing against the Senate’s outsize $109 billion supplemental spending package, which includes money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the real scandal is Bush’s own preference for financing much of the cost of the Iraq war outside the normal budget process. That is convenient for the administration, which does not have to count the money when it is pretending to balance the budget. But Iraq is not some kind of unexpected emergency. It is a highly predictable cost, now amounting to about $100 billion a year. Moving the war’s financing off budget subjects the military’s spending requests to less careful congressional scrutiny than they would receive during the usual budget process. More important, this fiscal sleight of hand makes it that much easier for the Pentagon to duck the hard choices it desperately needs to make between costly futuristic weapons and pressing real-world needs.

With so much of the war off budget, Congress is being asked to approve one of the biggest military budgets in American history for projects having little to do with current fighting. If the Bush administration wants to start winning back its credibility, and honest budgeting would be one good place to start.