Iraq War Costs US $12 Billion Per Month

Posted by Steven Reynolds, The All Spin Zone at 11:04 AM on March 10, 2008.

George Bush has run up record deficits during his seven+ years in the White House, ignoring what used to be thought of as a core Republican value, controlled spending. John McCain has supported Mr. Bush in the most expensive of his boondoggles, Iraq. In a country where the water provided by Halliburton (and KBR) makes our soldiers ill (seems a bad way to spend money to me), where the outsourcing started by Cheney and Rumsfeld has led to record poor performance and incompetence in Iraq, well. . . it looks like the future budget deficits for Mr. McCain’s next 100 years of US presence in Iraq are going to be records as well. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show.

In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the “burn” rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and coauthor Linda J. Bilmes write in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with “best-case” and “realistic-moderate” scenarios, they project that the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion - or more - by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.

Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted. But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say.

In a Jan. 30 report to Congress, the GAO said the United States would commit “significant” future resources to the wars, “requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge.”

These numbers do not include the war’s cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion - with its devastating air bombardments - and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.

No one has tried to calculate the economic damage to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.

With the kind of stress on our economy, it isn’t just millions of middle class jobs in Iraq that will be eliminated, but millions more American middle class jobs. Oh, I’m going to hear it from the Republicans who are beginning to flock to this site to comment and counter what they see as damaging to the McCain Presidency — (did these people learn from the Ron Paul model or something?)



Besides the news that John McCain is costing America jobs and that Bush policies he is proud of supporting are running up record deficits, which will cost more jobs, there is some good news. George Bush the Incompetent is now recommending that McCain run with Mitt Romney as a running mate. Seriously, and I hope John McCain is taking the Bush/Rove suggestion and not evaluating it one little bit. I’m hoping John McCain latches onto Mitt Romney like a life preserver. Alas, such a ticket will only sink McCain, thankfully.

Also, more and more Republicans are jumping off the McCain and Republican bandwagon. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) is upset with Republican criminality, and he firmly pins that to the White House. We should also be encouraged by the group Republicans for Obama, or so says Matthew Elias. A part of me doesn’t want any of these Republicans near our Party, but I’m intent enough on ditching the Bush/Cheney/McCain regime of the last seven+ years that I’ll even take support of Republicans.


h/t Think Progress for the video

Tagged as: bush, iraq, economy, mccain, deficits

Steven Reynolds is a regular blogger for the All Spin Zone