inside the glass house

Bogged down in billions
NEW YORK-- The American tax payer is literally paying a heavy price for what appears to be an inglorious US military misadventure in Iraq. Under severe grilling from Senators last week, Pentagon officials were forced to admit that the US military occupation of Iraq is costing a staggering $3.9 billion a month feeding and arming about 150,000 US soldiers.

The original estimate-- now proved wrong-- was that post-war Iraq could be militarily contained by about 50,000 US troops. But these all-too-pessimisstic Pentagon calculations have gone haywire as the death toll of American GIs keeps rising in the streets of Baghdad, Basra and Fallujah.

If the number of American troops is to be increased -- as it may well be, due to the growing urban guerrilla warfare by Iraqi insurgents -- the price of the Iraqi war will continue to escalate.

Depending on how long the US would remain bogged down in Iraq, the eventual costs of the war could reach or exceed a hefty $100 billion, coming mostly out of the pockets of US taxpayers. The total cost of the 1991 Gulf War was about $61 billion, of which $54 billion came from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The US share was only a paltry-- by American standards-- $7 billion.

But this time around, the US is virtually standing alone, with the only strong non-financial support coming from Britain. Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and a former presidential aspirant, complained last week that the Bush administration is still refusing to provide the public with the grim facts of the US occupation of Iraq.

"I think the American people need to be told: 'Look, we're going to be there for quite a while, and it's going to cost us quite a bit of money.'" The costs of past wars, according to the Congressional Research Service in Washington, never reached current heights.
The only exception was World War II whose price tag (calculated at costs at time) was about $360 billion compared with $33 billion for World War I, $50 billion for the Korean War and $111 billion for the Vietnam war.

As one US Senator said in a bygone era: "We are talking of a billion here, a billion there -- and very soon, we will be talking real money.'' But the war on Iraq is costing real money because, according to the New York Times, the US has been air-freighting planeloads of $20 dollar bills to pay the salaries and pensions of Iraqi policemen and soldiers who had demonstrated in the streets of Baghdad last month demanding past wages.

The Iraqi dinar, which still carries the image of the missing Iraqi president, is to be replaced soon with currency that will no longer carry his picture. With his recorded voice played on the Al-Jazeera tv network and over Beirut radio stations, Saddam Hussein still appears to be haunting Americans-- either from a safehouse somewhere in or out of Iraq, or from a graveyard.

The military costs of the war, however, would pale in comparison with human costs which is priceless. With US soldiers dying at the average of about one per day last month, even President Bush has been constrained to admit ''that there is no question that we have got a security issue in Iraq."

And this in a country where the US was expected to be greeted with rose petals and sweetmeats by Iraqis who wanted to be freed from the tyranny of the Saddam Hussein regime. As Vice President Dick Cheney remarked-- not so prophetically--before the war: "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators".

The real problem facing the Bush administration now is: "how do we get out of this mess?" Senator John Kerry, a ex-Vietnam veteran who has experienced the horrors of war, said that the US carried the war in Vietnam far too long "because of our pride".
Kerry said it is still not too late for the Bush administration to pocket its pride and raise a multinational force--including troops from France and Germany, two countries that opposed the US war on Iraq-- in order to salvage the current situation.

But how many US allies are willing to lend their troops to be targeted as potshots by Iraqis who, rightly, do not want any foreign occupiers in their native soil?. The US says it has been talking to about 70 countries seeking soldiers for a multinational peacekeeping force in Iraq. At least 19 nations are currently providing logistical support but not soldiers, while 19 others have promised troops.

But the responses have been slow in coming. India, which was expected to provide an infantry division, has had second thoughts. Since Iraq continues to remain unstable, both France and Germany are unlikely to provide troops-- unless there is a dramatic change in the situation on the ground.

The crisis in Iraq was best summed up by Senator Ted Kennedy (Democrat of Massachussets) who told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "We have the world's best-trained soldiers serving as policemen in what seems to be a shooting gallery."

Back to Columns