We know the Bush administration has mismanaged the conflict in Iraq and that it deceived the nation in advance about its costs in ways that are shocking.

We know also that President Bush’s pals are setting up “consulting firms” to parlay their access to the administration into millions, advising companies that lust after the billions in reconstruction dollars being spent in Iraq.

But given the shenanigans and misbehavior we’ve already seen, it seems clear that the biggest chunk of potential war profiteering may be as yet unexplored. The only question now is who will win their Pulitzer by following the money during the biggest Pentagon spending spree in memory?

Recall that conservatives, and even prudent Democrats, raised questions in the mid-1990s about the Head Start program’s ability to absorb the budget increases it was being given. Did the system have the capacity, people asked, to take in such new sums this quickly and spend them wisely?

If these questions were legitimate in a program that was being hiked from just a few billion dollars to a few billion more (we’re talking single-digit billions here), then how much more urgent are such questions in a defense budget that Bush has raised from the roughly $300 billion he inherited to what next year looks certain to top $450 billion?

Until now, inexplicably, this epic shoveling of money has received no media or congressional scrutiny at all. Anyone want to bet an $800 toilet seat that the abuse and enrichment taking place amidst this bonanza will make the rip-offs in Iraq look like small-time colonial looting?

The first sensible step would be to establish a standing congressional committee to monitor the post-Sept. 11 defense buildup. Unprecedented mountains of cash are being handed to a Pentagon that Bush’s own budget office says has not properly accounted for more than a trillion dollars in past years – and in an era when corporate misbehavior justifies extra scrutiny.

Harry Truman provides the model. In February 1941, outraged by what he was hearing about rip-offs by contractors in the war buildup, Truman proposed and was assigned to lead the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. Over the next few years, Truman exposed shocking waste, fraud and mismanagement, often thanks to leads from patriotic defense industry employees troubled by what their bosses were doing.

Truman landed on the cover of Time and earned national acclaim. “The man from Missouri,” his senate colleague Claude Pepper recalled later, “had dared to say ‘show me’ to the powerful military-industrial complex, and he had caught many people in the act.” It doesn’t detract from the remarkable accomplishments of our armed forces to say that a few $400 hammers and $800 toilet seats will make Bush’s defense budget as open to question as it deserves to be.

It will take a patriotic Republican who is bulletproof on defense to break ranks and help organize what ought to be bipartisan investigation here. John McCain is an obvious choice. Among Democrats, Wesley Clark has the credibility and stature to urge that such an

investigation be mounted.

But the national press can pursue these questions with or without congressional leadership. As Truman knew, there is no more central question of government performance than how vast sums are spent on defense – and no more corrosive thing for democracy than the presence of war profiteers in our midst.

Surely the outsized sums involved, combined with the emerging pattern of fiscal chicanery by those close to the administration, should prompt our top news organizations to devote substantial investigative talent and resources to these questions.

I’d like this sleuthing to begin pronto so that any needed exposes can appear next summer. This way we’ll have a chance to go into the last lap of the presidential campaign with our eyes wide open – not blind to what may be happening until some time after the November election.

Sadly for the country, if current patterns prove to be repeated on a more massive scale in his defense-spending spree, President Bush may turn out to have grossly mismanaged every aspect of our national security – that is, when he wasn’t busy sinking the economy, ignoring the uninsured or wrecking the budget.

Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is: [email protected].