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Iraq's liberation comes with a ballooning price tag

By Charles V. Pena, The Daily Star, February 24, 2005

In February 2003 - a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq - President George W. Bush declared that "[r]ebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own: we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before - in the peace that followed a world war."

However, Bush never addressed the question of cost. From the start, the administration has been, and continues to be, evasive about the costs of war in Iraq. But these costs cannot be ignored and must be weighed by the American public, particularly taxpayers, to determine whether they are willing to pay the price and make the necessary sacrifices to create a stable and peaceful democracy in Iraq - if that goal can be achieved at all.

When former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey suggested before the war that the conflict might cost $100 billion-$200 billion, he was rebuked and chose to resign three months later. Citing estimates from the Office of Management and Budget, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once thought the Iraq mission might cost $50 billion or less. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz opined that Iraqi oil revenues of $50 billion-$100 billion (instead of U.S. taxpayer dollars) would pay for the occupation and reconstruction. Wolfowitz also characterized Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki's estimate that it would take hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to occupy and subdue Iraq as "wildly off the mark." But it's been the administration that has been wildly off the mark when it comes to Iraq.

The White House will ask Congress for an $80 billion supplemental to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year. That's on top of the $25 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that was part of the Pentagon's fiscal year 2005 budget signed by the president last August. Added to previous supplemental requests - $75 billion in 2003 and $88 billion in 2004 - the cost of the Iraq war now exceeds Lindsey's prediction of $200 billion. Despite Wolfowitz's belief that U.S. forces could be reduced by 15,000 troops within a month, Bush refuses to posit an exit strategy at all: "They ask me, 'Is there a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq?' Here's the answer to that: You don't set timetables."

With the U.S. Army announcing it plans to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq for at least two more years, Lindsey's estimate will likely turn out overly optimistic.

The dollar cost of the Iraq war and subsequent occupation and reconstruction cannot be viewed in isolation. The fiscal year 2005 Defense Department budget that Bush signed last August was $417.5 billion, and the $80 billion supplemental brings military spending to nearly $500 billion. In real terms, that means that U.S. military spending is near an all-time high - exceeded only by spending in 1945-46 at the end of World War II and in 1952 at the height of the Korean War. It is more than peak spending during the war in Vietnam and the Reagan military buildup during one of the most intense periods of the Cold War.

The costs of the Iraq mission, though, are more than just dollars and cents. The prolonged U.S. military presence in Iraq has put a tremendous strain on the U.S. Army. Even if troop levels can be drawn down to 120,000 soldiers as is being currently planned (with another 30,000 U.S. troops in Kuwait to support the Iraqi military operation), the army will continue to be pushed to its limits. In order to maintain unit cohesiveness and meet rotation requirements, the Iraq mission has forced the military to resort to stop-loss orders to prevent soldiers from leaving service when their terms of enlistment expire. And to fill the need for critical skills, nearly 50 percent of the soldiers in Iraq are National Guardsmen and reservists, which threatens the viability of those force components. Indeed, in the past three years more National Guardsmen and reservists have been called to active duty than were cumulatively mobilized since the Cuban missile crisis - and that includes the Vietnam War, the Cuban refugee crisis, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and the 1991 Gulf War.

The Iraq mission has caused Wolfowitz to announce that what was supposed to be a temporary increase of 30,000 soldiers will now be a permanent increase in army troop strength in 2007. A recent letter from the Project for a New American Century to congressional leaders - signed by strange bedfellows including neoconservatives and liberal internationalists - called for increasing the size of the active duty army and Marine Corps by "at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years."

These military manpower pressures raise the specter of another potential cost: the return of the military draft. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Bush insisted, "We will not have a draft so long as I am president of the United States." The president is a man who means what he says and says what he means, so we should take him at his word. But avoiding a draft does not preclude the possibility of mandatory national service with a voluntary military component, as is done in some European countries.

Yet another hidden cost of the Iraq mission is the fact that many members of U.S. Special Forces units are resigning and taking more lucrative private security jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has forced the U.S. military to offer bonuses of up to $150,000 to retain these highly trained soldiers. The true price tag, however, is that the depletion of Special Forces means reducing the ranks of the military units that are the most critical in fighting the war on terrorism against Al-Qaeda.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has surmised that "we will never achieve democracy and stability [in Iraq] without being willing to commit 500,000 troops, spend $200 billion a year, probably have a draft, and have some form of war compensation." Brzezinski conceded that Americans "are not prepared to do that." Clearly, the U.S. cannot afford to sustain the Iraq mission at the current level of commitment for an indefinite period. The Pentagon's budget is not a bottomless pit: With the cost of the Iraq war driving the budget deficit to a record $427 billion, even the Defense Department has been asked to trim its sails a bit.

What the Bush administration is banking on is the Iraqis themselves. According to the president, a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq is "going to be based on the willingness and the capacity of the Iraqi troops to fight the enemy." The Pentagon says there are now over 135,000 trained and equipped Iraqi security forces and, to their credit, those forces acquitted themselves well on election day in Iraq. But with 150,000 U.S. troops still unable to put down a persistent insurgency, what are the realistic prospects that the Iraqis will do better in the foreseeable future? And how much will it cost to find out?

Charles V. Pena is the director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute (www.cato.org) and an analyst for MSNBC television (www.msnbc.com). He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR

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