With its foolish tax cuts and massive, conspiratorial campaigns against the American public, one would think the Bush administration had no real expenditures to worry about. Yeah…uh…not exactly.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service released a new report that says costs of fighting the "global war on terror" may be escalating out of control:
... the military is spending about $8 billion a month on Operation Iraqi Freedom and about $1.5 billion on Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. That is about $2 billion more per month than in fiscal 2005 and about $4 billion more than in fiscal 2004.
It was previously believed that the military's operating costs would sharply drop when major combat operations ended. But the continued pace of anti-insurgency operations, higher fuel costs and continued improvements in force protection gear and body armor in an effort to protect troops against increasingly powerful roadside bomb attacks have altered that mind-set. Wear and tear on military equipment that must be repaired or replaced and costs to train Iraq and Afghanistan security forces are other factors in the increase, the report says.
As usual, Salon puts the mess in proper perspective:
Before the Iraq war began, then White House budget director Mitch Daniels suggested that the total cost would be between $50 billion and $60 billion, and he dismissed an estimate of $200 billion as being at the "upper end of a hypothetical." To his credit, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said before the war that the ultimate cost was "not knowable." That's still a pretty accurate description, especially with the president clinging to a timeline-free, stand-up, stand-down policy. But the CRS says that even assuming substantial troop drawdowns in the near future, the cost of the two wars could exceed $800 billion by 2016.
That's right – EIGHT HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS! But hey, at least no one is profiting from this clusterfuck, right?
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