Hell = War = Good Business

The vast majority of the $3.5 billion spent per week for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ends up in the hands of private companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the former Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root.

The list of weapons and accessories paid for each week from a portion of the $3.5 billion total spent per week is long and daunting:

$1.5 million for M-4 carbines (about 900 guns per week);
$2.3 million for machine guns (about 170 per week);
$4.3 million for Hellfire missiles (about 50 missiles per week);
$6.9 million for night vision devices (about 2,100 per week);
$10.8 million for fuel per week;
$5 million to store and transport that fuel per week;
$14.8 million for F-18E/F fighter planes per week (one every four weeks);
$23.4 million for ammunition per week;
$30.7 million for Bradley fighting vehicles (10 per week).

And that's only a very partial list. What about the more mundane items?

"Laundries, showers, and latrines" cost more than $110,000 per week;
"Parachutes and aerial delivery systems" cost $950,000 per week;
"Runway snow removal and cleaning" costs $132,000 per week;
Flares cost $50,000 per week.

[Excerpt of an article by William D. Hartun, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation]

So who counted the cost of this war?

From a speech by Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank vice-president and an academic at the Columbia Business School:

"The public had been encouraged by the White House to ignore the costs of the war because of the belief that the war would somehow pay for itself or be paid for by Iraqi oil or US allies.

"When the Bush administration went to war in Iraq it obviously didn't focus very much on the cost. Larry Lindsey, the chief economic adviser, said the cost was going to be between $US100 - 200 billion - and for that slight moment of quasi-honesty he was fired.

"(Then Defence Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld responded and said 'baloney', and the number the administration came up with was $US50 - $US60 Billion. We have calculated that the cost was more like $US 3 Trillion.

"Three trillion is a very conservative number, the true costs are likely to be much larger than that."

[Excerpt of an article by Peter Wilson, The Australian]

Iraq war 'caused slowdown in the US'

The Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US3 Trillion ($3.3 Trillion) compared with the $US50-60 Billion predicted in 2003.

Professor Stiglitz told the Chatham House think tank in London that the Bush White House was currently estimating the cost of the war at about $US 500 Billion, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen.

The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said.

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said.

That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.

[Excerpt of an article by Peter Wilson, The Australian]

War costs estimated at over $3 trillion to date

When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration predicted that the war would be self-financing, and rebuilding the nation would cost less than $2 billion.

Coming up on the five-year anniversary of the invasion, a new estimate from a Nobel laureate puts the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at more than $3 trillion.

In their book “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, argue that the cost to America of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is wildly underestimated.

When other factors are added — such as interest on debt, future borrowing for war expenses, continued military presence in Iraq and lifetime health care and counseling for veterans — they think that the wars’ costs range from $5 trillion to $7 trillion.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine Corps colonel and Vietnam veteran, welcomed the effort by Stiglitz and Bilmes to quantify the ways in which the wars will cost taxpayers. “It’s astounding that here we are about to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and this administration still refuses to acknowledge the long-term costs of the war in Iraq,” he said.

By any estimate, the Bush administration’s predictions in March 2003 of a self-financing war have proved drastically inaccurate.

[Excerpt of an article by Kevin G. Hall – McClatchy Newspapers]

Paying Pakistan for the ‘War on Terror’

Once a month, Pakistan's Defense Ministry delivers 15 to 20 pages of spreadsheets to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, listing costs for feeding, clothing, billeting and maintaining 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistani troops along the Afghan border, in support of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

In response, the Defense Department has disbursed about $80 million monthly, or roughly $1 billion a year for the past six years, in one of the most generous U.S. military support programs worldwide. The U.S. aim has been to ensure that Pakistan remains the leading ally in combating extremism in South Asia.

But vague accounting, disputed expenses and suspicions about overbilling have recently made these payments to Pakistan highly controversial -- even within the U.S. government.

"Padding? Sure. Let's be honest, we're talking about Pakistan, which has a legacy of corruption," adds an U.S. official familiar with past U.S. payments. "But if they're billing us $5 billion and it's worth only $4 billion, and it's in the ballpark, does the bigger picture call for continuing on with a process that does generate significant progress on the war on terror?”

U.S. officials say the payments to Pakistan -- which over the past six years have totaled $5.7 billion -- were cheap compared with expenditures on Iraq, where the United States now spends at least $1 billion a week on military operations alone.

[Excerpt of an article by Robin Wright, Washington Post]

Paying Iraqi Insurgents Not to Fight

Launched last year, the "surge" was the extra 20,000-30,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq. These few extra troops, Americans were told, would finally supply the necessary forces to pacify Iraq.

[While taking credit for the success of the surge, the Bush Administration] is paying Sunni insurgents $800,000 a day not to attack U.S. forces. That's right, 80,000 members of an "Awakening group," the "Sons of Iraq," a newly formed "U.S.-allied security force" consisting of Sunni insurgents, are being paid $10 a day each not to attack U.S. troops.

In other words, the "surge" has had nothing to do with any decline in violence.

Currently, the Sunnis are only collecting $800,000 of the $275,000,000 it costs the U.S. to fight the war for one day.

If Bush's war turns out to be as big a boon for the Sunnis as it has for Tony Blair, we might have a modern-day version of The Mouse That Roared – a movie about an impoverished country that attacked the U.S. in order to be defeated and receive foreign aid – only this time the money comes as a payoff for not fighting the occupiers.

[Excerpt of an article by Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first ter, and former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal]

Support the troops!

According to the Washington Post (Feb. 9, 2008), Bush's $3.1 trillion federal budget provides no funding for his State of the Union address proposal, to permit military members to transfer their unused education benefits to family members. Bush got applause for his nationally televised words, but the troops and their families got no money in his budget.

The only money that Bush and Congress want to give the troops is what is required to keep them at war. They have already spent in out-of-pocket and future costs at least $1,000 billion. Every American can draw up lists of better uses of this immense fortune than blowing up a country's infrastructure and killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens.

"We support the troops!" is the excuse the Democrats have given for continuing to fund Bush's aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan. But war funding doesn't support the troops. It supports an evil machine that chews up and spits out the lives and well being of the troops, along with that of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan, men, women, and children.

[Excerpt of an article by Paul Craig Roberts, Creators Syndicate]

One Day of Iraqi Occupation = $720 Million

The Iraq war has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of U.S. military personnel. It is also costing $720 Million dollars each day - dollars that could be spent in much more constructive ways.

Third World Warriors fight U.S. wars - for dollars a day

With U.S. forces stretched thin in Iraq, private security companies have swept in to fill the void. But abuses of third-world security workers abound. And in many cases, those helping to fight our wars can't even cross our borders.

For one year, Mario Urquia guarded the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, protecting American service members and diplomats in one of the most dangerous places in the world. He is just one of thousands of individuals from impoverished nations recruited to help fight a war for the richest country in the world. A special forces soldier in the Honduran Army with nearly 30 years experience, Urquia said he was contacted in the summer of 2005 by a senior officer, who asked him if he would go to Iraq on behalf of the U.S. State Department.

Against salaries of $150,000 a year and more being paid to American contractors, the $15,600 annual salary promised to Urquia in his contract might seem strikingly inequitable. But in the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere the wage seemed a king's ransom to the lanky, stone-faced mechanic, army reservist and father of five children.

The Congressional Research Service has estimated there are 182,000 individuals working under U.S. contracts and subcontracts in Iraq. And a federal Government Accountability Office report last year estimated that more than 48,000 of those individuals are armed. That makes America's private-for-profit security force - U.S. leaders resist the term "mercenary" - the second largest armed group in the dwindling coalition that currently occupies Iraq, well ahead of U.S. ally Great Britain.

It's unclear how many armed contractors come from third-world countries, but federal reports indicate less than a fifth are Americans. he rest are recruited from dozens of other nations, including many places like Honduras, that are not a part of the Bush Administration's so-called "coalition of the willing." And like Honduras, many of the nations from which private security contractors are drawn are steeped in abject poverty. In these places, critics say, billion-dollar American companies can find plenty of people willing to risk their lives for wages as low as $31 a day - and who don't have a voice when things go wrong.

[Excerpt of article by Roxana Orellana, Salt Lake Tribune]

Iraq Money Down the Rat Hole

What can you get for a trillion bucks? Or make that $1.6 trillion, if you take the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as tallied by the majority staff of Congress' Joint Economic Committee (JEC).

Or is it the $3.5 trillion figure cited by Ron Paul, when expressing concern about the true cost of this war.

Given that the overall defense budget is now double what it was when Bush's father presided over the end of the Cold War, at a time when we don't have a militarily sophisticated enemy in sight, you have to wonder how this president has managed to exceed Cold War spending levels. What has he gotten for the trillions wasted? Nothing, when it comes to capturing Osama bin Laden, bringing democracy to Iraq or preventing oil prices from tripling and enriching the ayatollahs of Iran, while messing up the American economy.

But that money could have paid for a lot of things we could have used here at home. As Paul points out, for what the Iraq war costs, we could present each family of four a check for $46,000.

On the matter of covering the medically uninsured in America, it should be pointed out that we are the lone industrialized nation which can't afford to covered 47 million uninsured Americans.

[Excerpt of an article by Robert Scheer, Yahoo News]

George Bush Big Government Spender

George W. Bush, despite all his recent bravado about being an apostle of small government and budget-slashing, is “a big government guy,” said Stephen Slivinski, the director of budget studies at Cato Institute, a libertarian research group.

Take almost any yardstick and Bush generally exceeds the spending of his predecessors.

When adjusted for inflation, discretionary spending — or budget items that Congress and the president can control, including defense and domestic programs — shot up at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent during Bush’s first six years, Slivinski calculates, topping the 1.9 percent of Ronald Reagan.

Discretionary spending went up in Bush's first term by 48.5 percent, not adjusted for inflation, more than twice as much as Bill Clinton did (21.6 percent) in two full terms, Slivinski reports.

Defense spending: Under Bush it's grown on average by 5.7 percent a year. Under LBJ — who had a war to fund, too — it rose by 4.9 percent a year. Both numbers are adjusted for inflation.

Including costs for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending under Bush has gone up 86 percent since 2001, according to Chris Hellman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Current annual defense spending — not counting war costs — is 25 percent above the height of the Reagan-era buildup, Hellman said.

[McClatchy Newspapers]

Other Uses for the $611 Billion Spent on Iraq

The Boston Globe has taken a unique view of the latest Iraq War funding request, offering a look at what the $611.5 billion that would be spent so far on the war could buy if it was not used for the military operation.
Among the findings:

"According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015,

"...while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.

At the upper range of those estimates, the $611 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world's poor for seven years.

Additional applications:

• The $611 billion in war costs is 17 times the amount vetoed by the president for a $35 billion health plan for the States.

• $611 billion translates into almost 14 million free years of education at Harvard University.

[Excerpt of article by Joe Strupp, The Boston Globe]

A 2 point 4 Trillion Dollar War

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion through the next decade, or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.

A previous CBO estimate put the wars' costs at more than $1.6 trillion. This one adds $705 billion in interest, taking into account that the conflicts are being funded with borrowed money.

"The number is so big, it boggles the mind," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.

The CBO estimates assume that 75,000 troops will remain in both countries through 2017, including roughly 50,000 in Iraq. That is a "very speculative" projection, though it's not entirely unreasonable, said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the non-partisan Lexington Institute.

As of Sept. 30, the two wars have cost $604 billion, the CBO says. Adjusted for inflation, that is higher than the costs of the Korea and Vietnam conflicts, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

AlterNet

2008 to be the most expensive year of the Iraq War

The White House will ask Congress next week to approve another massive spending measure for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan totaling nearly 200 billion dollars, The Los Angeles Times reported on its website. Citing unnamed Pentagon officials, the newspaper said if President George W. Bush's spending request is approved, 2008 will be the most expensive year of the Iraq war.

Spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would then be about 195 billion in fiscal 2008, an increase of around 12 percent from the 173 billion dollars spent this year.

In 2004, the two conflicts together cost 94 billion dollars; in 2005, they cost 108 billion; in 2006, 122 billion, the paper said.

When costs of CIA operations and embassy expenses are added, the war in Iraq currently costs taxpayers about 12 billion dollars a month, said Winslow Wheeler, a former Republican congressional budget aide who is a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. "It all depends on what happens in Iraq, but thus far it has continued to get bloodier and more expensive."

[AFP]