Damning billions going down Iraqi rat holes

By Thalif Deen at the united nations

US soldiers from 1-501 Para-Infantry Regiment wade through a chest-deep canal during a patrol on Operation Gecko, 28 August 2007. Operation Gecko was launched as part of a US military strategy to partner with Iraqi Sunni volunteers, former insurgents who have joined forces with US and Iraqi troops to fight al-Qaeda, to clear through neighbourhoods and farmlands previously considered highly violent for US forces. AFP

NEW YORK - When Jesse Helms, the rigidly conservative rightwing Republican Senator from North Carolina, criticised US aid to developing nations, he famously said that American tax payer money should not be "going down foreign rat holes to countries that constantly oppose us at the United Nations."

A virulent critic of the UN, the former ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would have also exercised a second option -- if such a choice existed -- to cut off all American funding to the world body.

But that annual US contribution to the world body was only a measly $439 million -- perhaps rising to about a billion dollars or more if one takes into account the voluntary American contributions to other UN development agencies and humanitarian bodies. Still, these contributions are best described as "peanuts" compared to the US resources currently being drained into the real foreign rat hole: Iraq.
Last week the Bush administration said it will ask the US Congress up to $50 billion (that's a billion with a B) in additional funding for the military quagmire in Iraq. According to the Pentagon, the cost of the five-year-old Iraq war has already exceeded a staggering $330 billion, while total allocations earmarked could push the figure up to $456 billion.

The Pentagon also estimates that overall US spending in Iraq now surpasses a whopping $3 billion a week. Meanwhile, the other failed war in Afghanistan has cost the American tax payer an additional $78 billion. With the Bush administration refusing to withdraw even a token contingent of troops despite demands from Senators and Congressmen and also from the American public (as evidenced in nation-wide polls), the US military seems stuck in Iraq -- for worse, than for better.

As an Iraqi TV comedian Saad Khalifa says US troops are not actually departing on any specific date. But instead, he jokes, they are planning to leave "one by one". And at that rate, he says, it would take more than 600 years for US troops to leave Iraq. And as long as they continue to stay in Iraq -- until there is peace, stability and a full-fledged democracy -- US spending in Iraq will never stop rising.

"The financing of destruction has overtaken the financing of human development," says Yoke Ling of the Third World Network, a development-oriented non-governmental organisation based in Malaysia. "And every dollar spent on the Iraq war could have been used instead to bring us closer to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)," she added.

The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.

A summit meeting of 189 world leaders in September 2000 pledged to meet all of these goals by the year 2015. But their implementation has depended primarily on increased development aid by Western donors. But that aid has been slow in coming although military spending worldwide has been on the rise, reaching over one trillion dollars annually.

The world's 22 rich nations, comprising the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), grudgingly doled out about $104 billion in official development assistance (ODA) to the world's poorer nations in 2006. But just one solitary OECD member -- the United States -- has spent or allocated a staggering $456 billion on the ongoing five-year-old destructive war in Iraq.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says unequivocally: "The world wants no new promises." But he complains that the "lack of any significant" increase in ODA since 2004 "makes it impossible, even for well-governed countries, to meet the MDGs."

Ban points out that "adequate resources" need to be made available to countries in a predictable way for them to be able to effectively plan the scaling up of their investments. "Yet these promises remain to be fulfilled," the secretary-general declares. In 2005, ODA rose to a record $106.8 billion, due primarily to large debt relief operations, most notably for Iraq and Nigeria. In 2006, substantial debt relief to these two countries began to drop out of the equation, causing net aid disbursements to fall to $104 billion -- equivalent to 0.3 percent of developed countries' combined national income.

And in real terms, official aid dropped by 5.1 percent, the first decline since 1997, according to a UN study on MDGs. The only five donors to reach or exceed the UN target of 0.7 percent of gross national income for development aid -- set by the General Assembly about 37 years ago -- were Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Last month, the National Priorities Project (NPP), a research organisation based in Washington, placed Iraq war spending in a domestic context. The NPP said the $456 billion Washington is spending on the Iraq war could have been disbursed locally to provide some 5.7 million people with health care coverage for a five year period and about one million affordable housing units for the homeless in the United States.

The US military spending in Iraq could have also provided 4.7 million students with tuition-free education in a state university for four years, while 430,000 school teachers could have been hired in the United States during five years of an overseas war in Iraq.