The war in Iraq has been more expensive than every other US military conflict except World War II, but President Bush says we haven't spent enough there yet, nor does he think the war is all that costly in relative terms.
The defense budget, Bush stressed in a speech Thursday, is only 4 percent of the total US economy, compared to military spending that approached 13 percent of Gross Domestic Product during the Cold War and was 6 percent of GDP under President Reagan.
"Our citizens recognized that the imperative of stopping Soviet expansion, justified this expense," Bush said. Today's spending, he said, "pales when compared to the cost of another terrorist attack on our people. We should be able to agree that this is a burden worth bearing."
In addition to announcing a plan to halt a drawdown of US troops from Iraq this summer and reduce the length of deployment from 15 to 12 months, Bush also called on Congress to approve another $108 billion "emergency war funding request" that will continue paying for the conflict in Iraq that is stretching into its sixth year.
Despite the fact that we have been in Iraq for more than half a decade, and that the president has made clear his refusal to extricate US troops from the conflict, Bush continues to fund the conflict through these "emergency" requests, instead of including war funding in his annual Pentagon budget requests. In a recent article in the libertarian Reason magazine, Veronique de Rugy outlines the ramifications of this "opaque and politicized shell game" that has resulted in a war that will cost well more than $1 trillion.
How much money is $1 trillion? Enough to pay for the entire 1976 federal budget, adjusted for inflation. Enough to write a check for $37,500 to every Iraqi man, woman, and child. Enough to buy 169,492 Black Hawk helicopters, or 455 stealth bombers. Enough, in nominal terms, to pay for the entire federal government from 1789 to 1957. And it’s 10 times more than what specialists predict it would take to eradicate malaria once and for all.
The burden in Iraq has been little noticed in the average American's pocketbook because of its low cost relative to GDP, but it also has been financed mostly by borrowed money, and that bill will eventually come due. As the Reason article notes, Bush's method of funding this war is starkly at odds with historical practice.
In 1951, for instance, 72 percent of the kick-off cost for the Korean War —$33 billion in today’s dollars—went through supplemental appropriations, while $13 billion came from regular appropriations. But by year two, Congress appropriated 98 percent of the war’s funding through the regular defense budget. By 1953 the president no longer requested any funding outside of the regular defense budget.
The decade-long Vietnam War followed a similar pattern. In the first year of the war, Congress provided all of the funding in emergency supplemental bills. The second year, the administration requested a little less than 50 percent of the war funding within regular defense appropriations. By the fourth year, all of the war funding went through the regular defense budget process. This despite the fact that troop levels were in flux, military strategies were changing regularly, and the duration of the conflict could not be foreseen. In the 1990s, the Republican-led Congress showed a kind of discipline it would completely forget during the Bush presidency, directing President Bill Clinton in fiscal year 1996 to fund all ongoing military operations, including the enforcement of no-fly zones over Iraq, from the regular defense budget rather than supplementals. From then on, Clinton sought funding for Bosnia and other conflicts entirely through the regular appropriations process.
In the 1980s, throughout President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup, no Cold War spending was allocated through supplementals (see Figure 2). And once you account for the offsetting contributions from American allies during and after the first Gulf War ($35 billion out of the total $42 billion price tag), it is clear that until recently very little U.S. military spending was treated as an emergency.
What a difference with today’s wars. Five years into the Iraq conflict and seven years into Afghanistan, the administration and Congress have buried all of the explicit funding—totaling more than the spending on either the Korea or Vietnam wars when adjusted for inflation—in emergency supplementals.
In his speech Thursday, Bush justified the cost of the Iraq war by invoking the usual suspects: al Qaeda and Iran.
Al Qaeda, which was not in Iraq before the US invaded, "would claim a propaganda victory of colossal proportions and ... gain safe haven" if troops left the country. And Iran "would work to fill the vacuum in Iraq" if the Americans left.
This video is from MSNBC's News Live, broadcast April 10, 2008.
The war in Iraq has been more expensive than every other US military conflict except World War II, but President Bush says we haven't spent enough there yet, nor does he think the war is all that costly in relative terms.