As the late, great Sen. Everett Dirksen was alleged to have said -- though no one can prove he ever actually said it, "A billion dollars here and a billion dollars there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

The Government Accountability Office, the respected and incorruptible arm of the U.S. Congress, published a report this week revealing that the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was sitting on an unexpectedly large multibillion-dollar surplus from its own revenues that had been boosted by the profits from oil experts at a time when global oil prices are still way above $100 a barrel.

The GAO concluded the nest egg Baghdad was hatching could amount to as much as $79 billion by the end of this year. In a report, the agency noted Iraq had already built up a budgetary surplus of $29 billion in the three years from 2005 to 2007, even while the Shiite-Sunni civil war was raging at full intensity through 2006. This year Baghdad's government surplus was expected to reach as much as $50 billion, in addition to the $29 billion it had already piled up, the GAO said.

This news has infuriated the Democrats who control both houses of Congress. "It is inexcusable for U.S. taxpayers to continue to foot the bill for projects the Iraqis are fully capable of funding themselves," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Wednesday.

The story broke at the worst possible time for Bush and Sen. John McCain, the Republican Party's standard-bearer in the current presidential election. McCain has been proven far more effective, resilient, popular and politically savvy than the conventional wisdom in the mainstream U.S. media had expected. While they swooned over Democratic putative presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's swing through Afghanistan, the Middle East and Western Europe a couple of weeks ago, McCain, R-Ariz., has been steadily closing the gap on Obama, D-Ill., by plugging away on energy issues.

McCain was even able to get traction on the unpopular war in Iraq by pointing at extremely low U.S. casualties and other evidence that Gen. David Petraeus' surge policy, which also involved buying friends and spreading cash to influence people in Iraq's Anbar and Diyala provinces, as proof that his gutsy support of the surge through thick and thin proved him right and Obama wrong.

Now, however, McCain must be hoping that the GAO's revelations do not get popular traction in the election campaign.

The GAO's revelations teach other lessons. Bush administration policymakers were confident, when they launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to topple longtime dictator Saddam Hussein, that Iraq's oil revenues would mean the war would pay for itself.

As events over the following five years revealed, the Bush policymakers were totally wrong: They ignored the detailed evidence that their own State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Energy had painstakingly compiled documenting the run-down, decrepit nature of Iraq's oil industry infrastructure and how much investment and time it would take to repair it.

Also, they never dreamed that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq would metastasize and require the ongoing commitment of 15 to 16 combat brigades of the U.S. Army and Marines to suppress it -- or around 150,000 troops for more than half a decade.

But the Bush White House and Department of Defense made other false assumptions as well. They were misled by the willingness and ability of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to reimburse the U.S. Treasury for much of the cost of the 1991 Gulf War to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.

However, the Kuwaiti and Saudi governments were old, established, reliable and efficient governing entities. The government that U.S. policymakers eagerly pushed to create in Baghdad was brand-new, unpredictable and in many respects chaotic. It also has proven itself increasingly independent and ungrateful to Bush and his administration.

Maliki gave a boost in credibility to Obama when he visited Baghdad, calling on July 7 for the United States to agree to a clear deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraq and even hosting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an honored guest. The fact that his government appears both unable and unwilling to use the vast revenues it has gathered to even pay for its own national reconstruction should not, therefore, come as such a surprise.