Bending the Third Rail
Because We Should, We Can, We Do
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Flowers & Candy
I realize that this isn't really new news, but I thought you might be interested in the gory details:
The cost of the war in Iraq will reach $320 billion after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, and that total is likely to more than double before the war ends, the Congressional Research Service estimated this week.

The analysis, distributed to some members of Congress on Tuesday night, provides the most official cost estimate yet of a war whose price tag will rise by nearly 17 percent this year. Just last week, independent defense analysts looking only at Defense Department costs put the total at least $7 billion below the CRS figure.

Once the war spending bill is passed, military and diplomatic costs will have reached $101.8 billion this fiscal year, up from $87.3 billion in 2005, $77.3 billion in 2004 and $51 billion in 2003, the year of the invasion, congressional analysts said. Even if a gradual troop withdrawal begins this year, war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to rise by an additional $371 billion during the phaseout, the report said, citing a Congressional Budget Office study. When factoring in costs of the war in Afghanistan, the $811 billion total for both wars would have far exceeded the inflation-adjusted $549 billion cost of the Vietnam War.

"The costs are exceeding even the worst-case scenarios," said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
Costs for the war are accelerating upwards instead of going down. And despite the claim that we've trained 250,000 Iraqis troops, the Pentagon says we can't turn over anything to them yet. We will spend a trillion dollars on this fiasco before all is said and done and have well trained, well armed Iraqi militias fighting multiple civil wars in a completely destabilized region that happens to be the location of most of the world's oil reserves.

Do you have any idea what a trillion dollars would have bought? This site will give you some ideas.

This really is a tragedy of monumental proportions.
2 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
So far as I can tell, your numbers do not include estimates of post-war costs, which can go on for decades, including health care and rehab for the thousands of wounded servicemen. I've seen an estimate of 1-2 trillion dollars for this, alone.

Blogger Greyhair said...
Yep.

And the media doesn't include those costs either. Only those in the lurid swamps of the liberal blogosphere bother to mention that.