The Iraq escalator

The Toledo Blade - Oct 30, 2007

The cost of not challenging the Bush Administration on its war strategy in Iraq could be trillions of dollars over the next decade. That message, courtesy of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, should not be ignored by Congress or the American people.

CBO director Peter Orszag told members of the House Budget Committee that war costs are on track to approach $2.4 trillion over the next decade, even with an assumed draw-down of troops in five years. "Astonishing" and "staggering" was how lawmakers reacted to the new cost projections.

"Speculation" and "hypothetical" was how the White House brushed off the news, ever-averse to confronting the real cost of its war. This is the same administration, you'll recall, that in 2002 fired its top economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, after he disputed initial White House claims that the war would cost only $50 billion to $60 billion.

Supplemental budget requests and revisions every few months for tens of billions in military spending is this administration's tactic to prevent taxpayers from a getting a true sense of the cost.

The CBO forecast comes as Congress is reviewing yet another administration request for more money - an additional $46 billion - to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's on top of $150 billion already requested for fiscal year 2008, which began Oct. 1.

If the revised supplemental defense funds are approved by Congress, it would bring the total amount appropriated to fund the fighting to more than $800 billion. That's close to the price of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts combined.

At their current rate, war appropriations could reach $1 trillion by the time President Bush leaves office, which, critics note, is way beyond any projection made at the beginning of the Iraq invasion. And even if the United States draws down its military presence in Iraq more sharply than the CBO assumed and its projections drop to $1.7 trillion through the same period, the agency says the country is still on an "unsustainable fiscal path and something has to give."

So far congressional Democrats have been reluctant to use the power of the purse to refuse the President anything when it comes war-funding. And no politician wants to be accused of not supporting the troops, especially with a presidential election closing in.

But it's a mistake not to challenge the hundreds of billions approaching trillions that American taxpayers and their children and grandchildren will be forced to pay on behalf of a losing cause. That was the whole point of giving the Democrats control of Congress last year.

Moreover, with the Iraq war heading into its fifth year, and with no end in sight, Americans deserve straight talk about its monetary cost.

Since the White House prefers evasive spin - "We don't know how much the war is going to cost in the future" - to realistic number crunching, the task of truth-telling fell to the CBO.

It provides what may be the most comprehensive and far-reaching estimate to date of what it will cost if large numbers of American troops remain in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2017 - an unfortunate likelihood.

We ignore these numbers at our peril.