From the people who told you We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, an relatively soon.” [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, 27 March 2003]:
Yahoo! News – Bush to Seek $80B for Iraq, Afghan Wars: WASHINGTON – The Bush administration plans to announce Tuesday it will request about $80 billion more for this year’s costs of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, congressional aides said Monday.
The request would push the total provided so far for those wars and for U.S. efforts against terrorism elsewhere in the world to more than $280 billion since the first money was provided shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, airliner attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
That would be nearly half the $613 billion the United States spent for World War I or the $623 billion it expended for the Vietnam War, when the costs of those conflicts are translated into 2005 dollars.
$280,000,000,000. That’s a whole lot of money, even in Washington. Hard to wrap your mind around that many zeroes. You could think of it as $948.10 for every man, woman, and child in the US. Or maybe $43.65 for every human being on Earth. Or perhaps $202,898,550.72 for every US soldier killed in Iraq. Or we could get really silly and convert it to pennies, which would form ten and two-thirds Chicago Sears Tower-sized stacks of pennies, which stacked up would reach from here to planet Venus when it’s closest (27,614,738.91 miles) and weigh 87,483,479.38 tons (more than the weight of Kirstie Alley, Ruben Studdard, and Ralphie May combined!)
Adding additional pressure, the Congressional Budget Office planned to release a semi-annual report on the budget Tuesday that was expected to include a projection of war costs. Last September, the nonpartisan budget office projected the 10-year costs of the wars at $1.4 trillion at current levels of operations, and $1 trillion if the wars were gradually phased down.
One trillion dollars? Why, where will we come up with the two trillion dollars we need to transition over to private Social Security accounts? I know, we can give more tax cuts to the rich, who will expand business, and we can reap the tax revenue off of all the 28-hour-per-week full-time WalMart employees.
Aides said about three-fourths of the $80 billion was expected to be for the Army, which is bearing the brunt of the fighting in Iraq. It also was expected to include money for building a U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which has been estimated to cost $1.5 billion.
For comparison sake, in 1997 the estimated construction cost of the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, with its synchronized dancing fountains and faux Italian design, cost $1.6 billion. I hope they just included flat roofs in the design for the helicopters to land on as we evacuate, Saigon-style, at some point in the future.
Good thing we liberated all those Iraqis from death, imprisonment, and torture at the hands of a brutal dictator ensconced in exhorbitantly lavish palaces, huh?
