How much did the war cost, Daddy?

One of the things for which George W. Bush (and his cronies) will be noted in the history books is his ability to lie and dissemble effectively; so effectively that an entire nation was deceived as to one of the costliest military adventures in history.

Veronique de Rugy tells all about it in her article, "The Trillion-Dollar War," at Reason Magazine (reasononline).

Assuming that Bush's request for $196 billion for the fiscal year 2008 will be granted, and counting the recently-approved $70 billion in bridge funding, "then the total price tag for America's present wars will rise to at least $822 billion, approximately 80 percent of which will be spent on Iraq. That surpasses the cost of the Vietnam War ($670 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars). And the Iraq portion dwarfs the $50 to $60 billion cost predicted at the outset of the war by Mitch Daniels, then director of the Office of Management and Budget."

(Daniels, however, was merely parroting Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld (among others) who laughed at the notion that invading Iraq would be expensive--they didn't consider $50-60 billion "expensive.")

de Rugy notes that "These runaway costs do not include a single dollar from the Pentagon's annual operating budget, which in 2008 reached a whopping $481 billion. If the war were being accounted for based on a rational, transparent budget process instead of an opaque and politicized shell game, Americans would be painfully aware that we are now in the seventh year of what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has called a $1 trillion war."

(Note, however, that at least one recognized economist has estimated the the total cost of these misguided wars will eventually total $3 trillion!)

de Rugy asks, "How much money is $1 trillion? Enough to pay for the entire 1976 federal budget, adjusted for inflation. Enough to write a check for $37,500 to every Iraqi man, woman, and child. Enough to buy 169,492 Black Hawk helicopters, or 455 stealth bombers. Enough, in nominal terms, to pay for the entire federal government from 1789 to 1957. And it's 10 times more than what specialists predict it would take to eradicate malaria once and for all."


You can read the entire article here. Veronique de Rugy has spelled out in detail, not only the incredible stupidity of the Bush adminstration, but also its duplicity. For example: "Five years into the Iraq conflict and seven years into Afghanistan, the administration and Congress have buried all of the explicit funding--totaling more than the spending on either the Korea or Vietnam wars when adjusted for inflation--in emergency supplementals." [My emphasis]

Remember that when Bush or some other Repugnican repository of idiocy says that we cannot afford to have health care for our elderly or our children, or we can't afford to repair our country's decaying infrastructure, or we can't afford to hire new teachers and build new schools, or we can't afford to take care of those with no resources of their own...or...

What a waste! What a terrible shame! What a blot on the history of our country!