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Iraq $5.54 Million an Hour |
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Written by Kaleem Omar
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Monday, 05 May 2008 |
President George W. Bush last week asked Congress to approve $ 70 billion in funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the US fiscal year 2009, which begins on October 1, 2008. The Iraq war has already cost US taxpayers more than $ 500 billion dollars, and there is still no end in sight to the US’s utterly illegal occupation of Iraq. According to congressional analysts, the eventual total cost of the Iraq war and the occupation could be as high as $ 1.5 trillion – that’s $ 1,500 billion.
This cost does not include the cost of rebuilding Iraq’s shattered infrastructure, which has been destroyed by a massive US bombing campaign and other military action. Once an oil-rich country with the best educational and medical infrastructure in the Middle East, Iraq has now been reduced to little more than an economic basket case. Even Baghdad, the capital, still gets only a few hours of electricity a day. |
Thousands of Iraqis continue to die each month as a result of the war and US occupation. According to a survey carried out by Britain’s Opinion Research Business, since the beginning of the war in March 2003 up to the end of September 2007, over 1.2 million Iraqis have died violent deaths as a result of the conflict.
The total number of American soldiers killed is about 4,500 up to the end of last month. That’s a death ratio of one American per 266 Iraqis. It is anybody’s guess as to how many more Iraqis will be killed before the US occupation ends – if ever it does.
The occupation phase of the Iraq war is costing the United States 1,538 dollars a second, or 92,333 dollars a minute, or 5,540,000 dollars an hour. That works out to $ 133 million a day, or $ 3.99 billion a month. Let’s round it off at $ 4 billion a month. This figure was confirmed back in July 2003 in congressional testimony by then-US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld.
In a press briefing on April 16, 2003, Department of Defence Comptroller Dov Zakheim said the DoD was estimating the cost of the occupation – the period following the end of major military operations announced by President George W. Bush on May 1, 2003 in a speech aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln – at about $ 2 billion a month.
But the Congressional Budget Office subsequently suggested a $ 4 billion a month figure and Rumsfeld’s testimony in July 2003 showed that the DoD has doubled its earlier estimate.
Original DoD estimates put the cost of preparations for the conflict at between $ 10-12 billion to deploy and maintain the force used in the invasion of Iraq, plus about $ 9 billion over the month of actual fighting for the cost of fighting. Zakheim also estimated $ 5-7 billion for returning and reequipping the troops home at the end of the conflict, something that does not appear to be imminent.
That put the down payment for the conflict at between $ 24-28 billion, after $ 8 billion in foreign aid to supporters of the war was included. That money was included in the supplemental budget bill passed by the US Congress to fund the war.
General John Abizaid, who succeeded General Tommy Franks as head of the US Central Command and commander of American forces in Iraq, on July 16, 2003 labeled the conflict in Iraq a guerilla war and said that replacement troops to be sent there should expect year-long deployments of the type used during the Vietnam War.
Abizaid went further than US officials had before in describing the daily attacks on US troops, and the mounting death toll, as the result of “guerrilla tactics” that are growing in regional coordination, skill and the ability to exploit weak spots in US activities.
Abizaid also pledged to start bringing home the longest-serving troops in Iraq by September 2003 but said the replacements for the US 3rd Infantry Division should plan to be in Iraq for up to a year – a rotation common in the Vietnam era but rarely used now.
The combination of Abizaid’s main points – the notion of US troops digging in in Iraq for extended stays to fight against a shadowy yet sophisticated foe – signaled the growing seriousness with which top American military commanders have now been compelled to view the situation in Iraq.
Only two weeks earlier, Rumsfeld had pointedly refused to label Iraq a guerrilla war, saying it didn’t exhibit the kind of coordination that fits the term. But Abizaid said on July 16, 2003 that US troops were facing a “classical guerrilla-type campaign.”
His comments came amid a brewing public relations problem for the Bush administration over televised interviews with US troops in Iraq that week about morale problems stemming from the dangerous duty and ever-shifting dates when they would be allowed to come home.
“If Donald Rumsfeld were here, I’d ask for his resignation,” one disgruntled soldier said back then on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show. Asked by a reporter what his message would be for Rumsfeld, another said: “I would ask him why we are still here. I don’t have any clue as to why we are still in Iraq.”
That same question can be asked today, five years later. No one in the Bush administration could give a plausible answer to that question in 2003, and no one in the Bush administration can give a plausible answer to that question today, in May 2008.
A US Senate fact-finding mission headed by Republican Senator Richard Lugar that visited Iraq in June 2003 concluded that American forces might have to stay in Iraq for up to five years. Those five years are no up but there is still no sign of when the US troops will leave.
Meanwhile, Quite the occupation of Iraq is costing US taxpayers about $ 4 billion a month.
According to Newsweek magazine, however, this $ 4 billion a month figure is just the beginning. “It doesn’t include the cost of running Iraq’s government and rebuilding it, which could be an additional billion a month, according to rough UN estimates made before the war,” Newsweek noted. “Then there’s the matter of Iraq’s enormous debts…Estimates of the total external debt, including war reparations to Kuwait, run well over $ 100 billion. How will the reconstruction be funded? For the administration it’s an especially painful question, in part because it comes at a time when the US economy is in the doldrums, when budget deficits are ballooning and when tax cuts are the preferred method of getting business churning again.”
The White House forecast last week that the US budget deficit would be about $ 455 billion in the current fiscal year. The Bush administration said that the deficit had been exacerbated by a weak US economy, the Iraq war and tax cuts.
But whose fault is the weak US economy, the Iraq war and tax cuts? The answer, of course, is that it is the Bush administration’s own fault.
The shortfall, soaring from a deficit of $ 159 billion in 2003, grew again to $ 475 billion in fiscal 2004, according to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
These figures included money requested to fight the war in Iraq, but not the extra finances required for ongoing operations.
The White House forecast unleashed a political storm in Washington. Democrats “pounced on the figures” as evidence that Bush, who has signed a 350-billion-dollar tax cut package into law, was mismanaging the economy.
“This current administration has squandered record surpluses and plunged us into record deficits,” said then Senator Bob Graham, a senator from Florida. “These new deficit numbers prove that Bush has been totally irresponsible, and it’s already cost us 2.5 million jobs,” he said.
The White House vowed to halve the deficit within years, but just how it proposed to do so was unclear.
The deficit for 2003 further underlined a dramatic deterioration in the books since 2000, when the Clinton administration posted a 236-billion-dollar surplus.
According to the White House, federal spending surged 10 per cent in 2003 to $ 2.21 trillion, while receipts fell 5.2 per cent to $ 1.76 trillion. In 2004, spending rose 2.7 per cent, outpacing a 2.3 per cent gain in receipts.
Back in May 2003, Bush claimed that his administration had accomplished the US mission in Iraq. What he has not been able to explain to date is that if the “mission” was “accomplished” in 2003, what are 160,000 US troops still doing in Iraq? Nor has he been able to explain just what that so-called “mission” was in the first place.
The good news is that Bush now has only a little over nine months to go as president. Whoever wins the presidential election in November cannot possibly be worse than Bush. Or can they? One asks this question because the Republican presumptive nominee, John McCain, says US troops may have to stay in Iraq for another hundred years, while Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton talks of “obliterating” Iran, if it attacks Israel. |
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