Pentagon Request of $99.7 Billion More for War Would Set Record

[swag]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=acO...

By Tony Capaccio

Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Spending on Iraq, Afghanistan and the global war on terror would reach a record $170 billion in fiscal 2007 under the latest U.S. Defense Department emergency spending request.

The military's request for $99.7 billion more in funding comes on top of the $70 billion that Congress approved in September and is 45 percent higher than the $117 billion in supplemental funding approved last year.

The request, under review at the White House, is in a 17- page, Dec. 7 memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. About half the new money -- $48 billion -- would go to the Army, which says its costs have risen sharply as fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan drags on and more equipment is damaged or destroyed.

It reflects an earlier England memo telling the services they could include in the emergency request expenses they considered related to the global war on terror even if not strictly to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

. . .

[whistle]

1. Oh those poor poor military contractors, they are being so so underpaid

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. Seems no matter how much money they have

it's never enough. Yet, they still haven't even found Osama.

[izzie]

3. We do need more ships that will not sail.

--

[Vinca]

4. Yet we can't afford universal health care. nt

[LynnTheDem]

5. But no funds for New Orleans.

Wake up, America.

[underpants]

6. What a nice Walmart amount 99.7

not 100 mind you oh no it only slash-slash-slash 99.7!!!

[Wednesdays]

7. Quick math says...

that amount of money could form a line that would stretch approximately from here to the moon. And that would be $50 bills, not single dollars.

[truthisfreedom]

11. $170,000,000,000 would pay for installing $20k full solar electric capacity on 8.5 million homes.

Or put complete mass-transit light-rail systems into every single major city in the US.

Or repair every single bridge and fully-update every inch of Federal highway.

Or give every single man, woman, and child in Iraq $6500.00.

Or, as chimpy plans, kill another 100,000 innocent civilians, another 1000 of our troops, and generally blow shit up. Coming from a child whose primary fascination was killing frogs, it seems clear what's going on with this presidency. Chimpy must kill.

[gratuitous]

8. Remember the guy who got fired for saying the war could cost $40 billion?

Seems almost quaint now to look back at late 2002 and early 2003, when the new product line was being rolled out, and a war with Iraq was hardly going to cost anything. Hell, what with oil revenues stolen from the Iraqi people, it would pay for itself! And how long would it last? Well, maybe a bit longer than six days, maybe six weeks? They couldn't feature a war that would last six whole months.

And now, four years later, we're poised to spend $170 billion on Iraq, Afghanistan and the global war on terror; but mostly on Iraq.

Haw, haw, the Bush administration sure pulled a fast one on us! Okay, set it up again, and we'll play some more.

[Tempest]

9. It was Bush's former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill

And he said it would cost $200 billion.

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Paul_O\'Neill

We're over $1 trillion now.

[gratuitous]

10. My foggy old brain

I seem to recall someone else who predicted a cost of $40 or $50 billion; he wasn't as high as O'Neill, some lower level factotum. He came out with that estimate in late 2002 or early 2003, and was gone like shot through a goose.

[Tempest]

12. You might be thinking of Larry Lindsey

He too gave an estimate of $200 billion.

And like O'Neill, Lindsey was also fired by Bush soon after.

[gratuitous]

14. Lindsey got cashiered for rampant honesty

But I did some checking around, and the person I was thinking of was Mitch Daniels, who forecast a cost of $50 or $60 billion in response to Lindsey's $200 billion guess.

[Tempest]

16. I forgot all about ole' Mitch

Easy to do when so many people were fired from the administration just for telling the truth.

FYI, here's a list of quotes about the cost of the war:

http://www.house.gov/schakowsky/iraqquotes_web.htm

[Zech Marquis]

13. I have a simple solution to this..

let Halliburton and the fucking oil companies pay for this shit!!! I'm sure they can somehow come up with a spare $99 billion

[Rex]

15. Hey, no need to spend that money on things like education and health

care. Just fork it over to the death industry.

America, land of bombs and empire.

Fucking sad.

[Frank Cannon]

17. Congress should give them the $100 billion...

immediately after they publicly account for EVERY PENNY of the hundreds of billions of dollars we've given them so far.

Otherwise, forget it. Our country has a war addiction and we're hitting rock bottom. Time for an intervention.

[badgervan]

18. Exactly

Just Say No. Until every cent that has been spent over the past 4+ years for "defense" has been accounted for - and that includes every single mercenary company, including Haliburton and subsidiaries, and every single corporation that has made a dime on this Iraq fiasco.
How much is enough, dem legislators, before you ACT? Keep giving out money, and then bitch when they want more? Hell, why not just give the repubs an open checkbook on our treasury? Oh yeah - you already have.

[ctaylor721a]

19. I can't believe this is more than Vietnam

"The annual cost of the war in Iraq now exceeds that of the Vietnam War at its height. Adjusted for inflation, the U.S. in 1968 spent $121 billion in Vietnam and a total of $631 billion for the duration of the war, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The Iraq Study Group, in the report it released Dec. 6, estimated the cost of the war in Iraq and postwar reconstruction will soar to $2 trillion, about 20 times the Bush administration estimate ahead of the March 2003 invasion. "

--
I can't even think of how the American people benefitted from this expenditure. Whether the Iraqi peopl even benefitted is an open question.