[April 30, 2006]

War's 'emergency' spending is routine

(News & Observer, The (Raleigh, NC) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Apr. 30--WASHINGTON -- When Lawrence Lindsey, then President Bush's top economic adviser, said in September 2002 that war in Iraq might cost the United States as much as $200 billion, other top aides rebuked him, and Bush fired him three months later.

Turns out, Lindsey's projection was indeed way off the mark -- way low off the mark.

The Senate is expected to pass an emergency spending bill this week to provide $71 billion for military costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the bulk of it going to Iraq.

The new money would bring to at least $320 billion the total cost of a war that senior Bush aides once promised would be financed largely by Iraqi oil revenues.

Soaring costs driven by the harsh Iraqi climate's wear-and-tear on tanks, trucks and helicopters have more than tripled U.S. spending on equipment -- from $7.2 billion in 2003 to $24.4 billion this year -- according to a new report by the bipartisan Congressional Research Service.

The Iraq campaign's total cost is still well behind the price tag for the country's decade-long debacle in Vietnam -- $549 billion, after adjusting for inflation. But the government's rate of spending on Iraq has outpaced the average spending rate in Vietnam, passing $8 billion a month.

The spending measure is the fourth emergency appropriations bill Bush has asked Congress to pass to pay for the war in as many years, with each legislative initiative larger than the last.

While the Iraq spending bills have gained huge majorities from lawmakers fearful of being seen as voting against the needs of American soldiers, Republicans are beginning to join Democrats in criticizing the use of emergency funding bills to pay for the war.

"The whole idea of this supplemental is something the American people should reject," said Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican. "We have been in a war now going into the fourth year. We should have the money for funding this war as part of the regular budget."

Coburn, who had partial success in offering 17 amendments to pare from the bill spending unrelated to the war, said the war supplementals allow Bush and Congress to portray themselves as acting more fiscally responsible than they really are.

"You hear the budget numbers this year for what the budget will be, and it will not count this money," Coburn said, "although it will be added to the IOUs that our children and our grandchildren will be paying back."

Rumsfeld's $50 billion

Before U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forecast that the entire war might cost $50 billion or so.

Paul Wolfowitz, then Rumsfeld's top aide, confidently predicted that profits from Iraq's vast oil reserves would pay for the war. He put those figures between $50 billion and $100 billion -- far more than the $25 billion that Iraqi oil wells are projected to produce this year, with much of the profit paying for security to guard pipelines under frequent attack from insurgents.

"We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon," Wolfowitz told Congress scarcely a week after the war started.

Steven Davis, a public policy and economics professor at the University of Chicago, said U.S. officials grossly underestimated the war's cost for a variety of reasons.

"The occupation phase of the war has been much longer and more difficult than anticipated," Davis said. "And the initial cost estimates didn't really recognize that when you take equipment into a war theater and use it intensely, it depreciates much more quickly than during peacetime."

The U.S. military's high-tech equipment is costly, Davis said, and today's volunteer armed service members are paid more than draftees of the Vietnam War.

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