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Cost of War

Vol. 2, No. 2--March 19, 2005

The Bush administration has requested $80 billion in supplemental funding to continue the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. "Supplemental" means costs of war that do not appear in the program-slashing 2006 Federal budget. As your Congressional representatives debate the cost of the continuing occupation, bear in mind what is being spent to fund this debacle on a daily basis. The National Priorities Project's latest publication analyzes the $82 billion request for war-related funding. Included are updated state and city cost of war numbers. Here's a running total of the cost of the Iraq war, as well as a link to see the costs to your community:

The amount that US taxpayers are spending to fund the war is nearly beyond comprehension. Remember that the initial funding request to Congress for the war to find WMD was $87 billion (September 2003). Since then, US taxpayers have spent on average $1 billion per month-in dollars that have not been fully accounted for. To give you an idea of how much money is flying out of your wallet, view this graphical representation of what $87 billion looks like.

Making these expenditures even harder to justify, according to Arianna Huffington, "...only 27 cents of every dollar spent on rebuilding Iraq has gone to actually improving the lives of its people, with the rest going to security, waste, overhead, and fattening the bottom line of big U.S. corporations."

But the true cost of the war is not the dollar cost. The direct cost in lives lost and ruined is incalculable. The indirect costs to America's position in the world, to our economy, to our communities will take years to tally. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently ran an article stating that for the Bush administration it is "...better to talk about Social Security reform and banning gay marriage than to call attention to the unhappy fact that we are spending several billion dollars per month and losing, on average, two soldiers per day -- not to prevail but simply to prolong the stalemate."

[read the full article]

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