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Military Budget SoarsThe $79 billion recently approved by Congress to pay for the first phase of the Iraqi war and occupation is only the tip of the iceberg of Bush's military spending. The price tag for the war sits atop an already incredible and mounting defense budget of $399 billion. Presenting the initial request to Congress, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that he would be back for more. How much more? "A lot," was his answer. We will pay for the cost of the military occupation of Iraq for many years to come. Seven years after the war in Bosnia, where the U.S. aspirations for post-conflict reconstruction and nation-building were far more modest, our troops are still there.
Then there is the actual cost of reconstruction. The European Union has stated that unless the United Nations heads up reconstruction efforts, it will not contribute. But the U.S. has been clear on who should lead reconstruction--American companies. CORPORATE BONANZABechtel is on track to control the lion's share of as much as $100 billion in reconstruction spending. A report by the Institute for Policy Studies shows that Bechtel has been laying the groundwork for this contracting bonanza for 20 years, with Donald Rumsfeld as its lobbyist. (See www.ips-dc.org/crudevision/index.htm) Peering further underwater, we find the rest of the military budget. Since fiscal year 2000, military spending requests have jumped from Clinton's already huge $288.8 billion to Bush's breathtaking $399.1 billion. But that request excludes the costs of the Iraq war and occupation. The first supplemental appropriation, the $79 billion just approved, is the largest one in history. Administration enthusiasts reassure us that this spending is an "absorbable" cost even as the country faces its largest deficit in history--a projected $385 billion. This is nearly $100 billion more than the previous record of 1992. The combination of military increases and massive tax cuts will squeeze billions out of domestic spending on everything from health care to environmental protection to education to unemployment insurance. The president's proposed budget even shortchanges his own No Child Left Behind education initiative. (See chart for what the money spent on the war could buy in terms of education). While administration officials have been coy about revealing the costs of the war to the public, they have been surprisingly forthright about the budgetary implications of their war program. The White House Budget Director, Mitch Daniels, has warned that more guns means less butter. "To avoid the guns-and-butter mistake, we're trying to hold everything nonsecurity-related to very severe scrutiny," he told a congressional committee in the fall. The president used the same rationale when warning cash-strapped states to not anticipate any aid from the federal government: "It's because we went through a recession and we're at war." Buried at the bottom of the financial iceberg is the cost of a national security doctrine predicated on waging preventive war indefinitely against an ever-expanding list of potential threats. As stunning as the current costs of war are, they may be just the beginning. Miriam Pemberton is an editor of Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org) at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. |
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