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Robert Scheer | War Costs Spiral Out of Control    [

    Trillion-Dollar War: Afghanistan and Iraq Set to Cost More Than Vietnam and Korea
    By Leonard Doyle
    The Independent UK

    Wednesday 24 October 2007

    President George Bush will have spent more than $1 trillion on military adventures by the time he leaves office at the end of next year, more than the entire amount spent on the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

    There are also disturbing signs that Mr Bush is preparing an attack on Iran during his remaining months in office. He has demanded $46bn ( 22.5bn) emergency funds from Congress by Christmas and included with it a single sentence requesting money to upgrade the B-2 "stealth" bomber.

    By wrapping his request in the flag of patriotism, the President has made it very difficult even for an anti-war Congress to refuse the money. He was accompanied by the family of a dead US marine when he made the request for funds on Monday.

    The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has attacked the President's priorities saying: "For the cost of less than 40 days in Iraq, we could provide health care coverage to 10 million children for an entire year."

    "The President is happy to put the military spending on the national credit card," said Steve Kosiak, a vice-president of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent, military policy research institute, who said that the $1trn figure will soon be passed.

    The full amount requested for this fiscal year is now $196.4bn. The US is on course to spend a total of $806bn fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than on any war it has fought since the Second World War. With interest payments this tops $1trn.

    Despite their expense, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are less of an economic burden (at 4.2 per cent of GDP) than earlier wars. The 1990-91 Gulf War cost $88bn, the Korean War cost $456bn (12.2 per cent of GDP) and the Vietnam War, $518bn (9.4 per cent of GDP). By comparison the Second World War cost more than 40 per cent of GDP.

    Mr Kosiak also points out that the military is using the cover of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to get funding for all sorts of projects. The upgrade of the stealth bomber is one of those projects.

    The Pentagon wants to upgrade its fleet of stealth bombers so that they can deliver 30-tonne, satellite-guided bombs. The planes would be based on the British Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia where hangars are being specially upgraded. These "bunker-buster" bombs are six times bigger than anything used by the air force and designed to destroy weapons of mass destruction facilities underground. Diego Garcia is also much closer to Iran than Missouri, where the bombers are based.

    This weekend Vice-President Dick Cheney stepped up the rhetoric, warning of "serious consequences" if Iran refuses to stop enriching uranium and said the US would not permit it to get nuclear weapons. Iran denies that the enrichment is linked to a nuclear weapons programme and says it is entirely peaceful.

    David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, who was in Washington for talks with the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, yesterday would not be drawn on Mr Cheney's remarks.

    Mr Bush's request for an extra $46bn in funds by Christmas has angered Congress, but it is expected to be approved.

    This year's request for extra military spending is already the largest since 11 September 2001 and rising fast.

    The lion's share of the money Mr Bush has asked for is for the Pentagon. Some has also been earmarked for UN peacekeeping in Darfur, emergency food aid in Africa and sending oil to North Korea as part of a deal to end its nuclear weapons programme.

    * The US State Department has been harshly criticised for failing to oversee the private security companies it relies on in Iraq.

    An internal review found poor supervision and accountability for companies such as Blackwater USA as well as DynCorp.

    An audit of DynCorp says its record keeping is so poor that the State Department cannot account for $1.2bn ( 590m) it paid the company since 2004 to train Iraqi police officers.

 

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    War Costs Spiral Out of Control
    By Robert Scheer
    Truthdig.com

    Tuesday 23 October 2007

    Hey, a billion here, a billion there, who's counting? Not the State Department, which admitted this week that it can't say "specifically what it received" for the $1.2 billion it paid DynCorp, ostensibly to train the Iraqi police--other than that somebody got an Olympic-size swimming pool out of the deal.

    On Monday, President Bush demanded that Congress fork over $46 billion more to pay for his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, insisting that it be approved by the end of the year. That brings the total requested this year in "supplementary funds" for his foreign adventures to $196.4 billion, and the prez said Congress had better pony up or it will be betraying the family of the dead Marine that he was using as prop for this particular White House photo op.

    Of course the Democrats, after some pussyfooting, will sign off, as they have for the rest of the more than $800 billion that will have been allotted for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts by year's end, lest they be accused of failing the troops that Bush has put in harm's way. "Our men and women on the front lines should not be caught in the middle of partisan disagreements in Washington, D.C.," Bush warned darkly, while edging ever closer to the family of the fallen Marine. "I often hear that war critics oppose my decisions, but still support the troops," he said. "Well, I'll take them at their word--and this is the chance to show it."

    I half-expected some leading Democrat to respond: "Hey, you want support for the troops, I'll see your $46 billion and raise you another $46 billion." But then again, Joe Lieberman is no longer running the party. Instead, the Democrats tried to show that $46 billion is not loose change and that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, a mere 40 days of the cost of the Iraq war could provide annual health insurance coverage for 10 million American children. Harry Reid added that the money might be better spent for law enforcement, homeland security and fixing the sagging infrastructure, but his argument isn't going to get any better traction than Pelosi's. As Reid pointed out, "this intractable civil war in Iraq ... is being paid for by borrowed money."

    Sure, some day the Chinese communists and others holding our debt will have to be paid back with compounded interest, but for now the war has been successfully marketed as a financial freebie. Leave it to the next generation to wake up and discover that this war, which in constant dollars has already cost more than the Korean or Vietnam wars, prevents Congress from implementing any of the needed domestic programs, even those advocated by both parties, as was the children's health insurance bill vetoed by Bush last week. But even if you think none of that domestic spending is needed, even for fixing Medicare and Social Security, the cost of this war will require a substantial increase in taxes over coming decades.

    The Congressional Budget Office estimates the future additional costs of these wars over the next 10 years at between $481 billion and $1.01 trillion, depending on how fast the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are wound down. Those are extremely optimistic projections that assume these wars will wind down and that the U.S. will be able to finally climb out of the quagmire. Much more likely is the spread of those wars to neighboring battle theaters in Pakistan and Iran. And that's without conjuring up the prospect of WWIII, as Bush did last week.

    Understand further that all of the numbers referenced above pertain only to that part of the defense budget directly attributable to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Post-9/11 defense spending, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has seen a 40 percent increase for building high-tech Cold War-era weapons in a charade that assumes that stateless terrorists present a military challenge even greater than the once mighty Soviet armed forces. The $686 billion overall 2008 defense budget is the highest since World War II.

    There was a time when responsible politicians would decry this looting of the public treasury, but not now, when we are in the midst of a never-ending "war on terror." Not now, when a Marine dies a needless death in Iraq, a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, or in any substantiated way presented a threat to the United States, and his family can be produced as cover for a president determined to morally and financially bankrupt the nation.