Iraq war has cost US $320-bn – analysts
http://www.iol.co.za/
By Rupert Cornwell
Washington – The Iraq war has already cost the United States $320-billion, according to a new authoritative report here – and even if a troop withdrawal begins in 2006, the conflict is set to be more expensive than the Vietnam war, a generation ago.
The estimate, circulated this week by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), can only increase unease over the US presence in Iraq, whose direct costs now run at some $6-billion a month, or $200-million a day, with no end in sight.
The Bush administration has refused to provide any specific overall figure for the war’s cost. But the Senate is set to approve another emergency spending bill in May, meaning that Iraq will have consumed $101-billion in fiscal 2006 alone, almost double the $51-billion of in 2003, the year of the invasion itself – and all at a time when the federal budget deficit is running at near record levels.
Vietnam claimed 58 000 American lives, far more than the almost 2 400 lost in Iraq thus far
But these figures pale beside what lies in store, the CRS says in its analysis. The Bush administration is desperate to announce a significant reduction in the 130 000 strong US force before November’s mid-term elections, where public disillusion with the war threatens disaster for the Republicans.
However even if everything goes relatively smoothly, costs until a phase-out is complete could top $370-billion (£206-billion). This would make the Iraq conflict, now into its fourth year, more expensive in financial terms than the Vietnam war, which lasted eight years.
Vietnam claimed 58 000 American lives, far more than the almost 2 400 lost in Iraq thus far. But in today’s dollars it cost ‘only’ $549-billion, much less than the $690-billion for Iraq, and a projected combined $811-billion bill of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is a far cry from the weeks before the war, when a White House official was rapped on the knuckles for suggesting the cost might be between $100-billion and $200-billion, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, was touting “a number that’s somewhere under $50-billion.”
Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank but then Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon, even theorised before Congress that the post-invasion period might pay for itself as Iraq’s oil revenues soared.
The US fought almost for free
But the CRS analysis is restrained compared to other non-official figures.
Scott Wallsten of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank here, has estimated an overall cost of $500-billion thus, with as much again possible. Most, he says, will be paid for by the US (unlike the first Gulf War in 1990/1991 which the US fought almost for free, thanks to contributions from Saudi Arabia, Japan and other allies).
In January a study by Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia University economist and former Nobel Prize winner, and the Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes reckoned the conflict could ultimately cost $2-trillion (£1.1-trillion), if all factors are taken into account.
These include the long term healthcare costs for the 16 000 US soldiers already wounded in the conflict, and other indirect or hidden costs such as the rise in the price of oil, the need to finance larger budget deficits, higher recruiting costs and losses to the economy caused by the wounded.
The Pentagon has treated such outside estimates with disdain. But it resolutely refused to give a detailed picture of its own. The CRS report lists various “key war cost questions” and “major unknowns” such as future troop levels.
Some experts however suggest the Pentagon may have deliberately inflated its financial needs now, fearing that as the war becomes ever more unpopular, Congress will grow less willing to provide funds for them in the future.
