Eighty-seven billion dollars. That’s the amount President George W. Bush has asked Congress to appropriate in the next fiscal year for the military occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. That will bring the cost of the Iraq war to a two-year total of $166 billion. The entire sum will be added to the deficit, which is now expected to reach half a trillion dollars. If nothing else, the president’s request should put the final nail in the coffin of the Republican Party’s reputation for fiscal responsibility.
Bush and his economic advisers are gambling that the economy will rebound despite what threatens to be a deficit that will reach 5 percent of the gross domestic product, a threshold of indebtedness many economists fear will trigger economic instability, if not disaster. The president seems immune to such worries, convinced that his policy of tax cuts and unlimited military spending will stimulate business investment and jobs and consequently tax revenue. Of course, however many billions he spends on the ill-defined war on terrorism, Bush continues to chastise Congress about “discretionary” domestic spending. But like the rosy scenarios of a quick transformation of Iraq from despotism to democracy, the administration’s budget making is based more on rigid ideology than economic reality or political realism.
Only last spring administration hawks, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, were blithely telling Congress that war in Iraq could be done on the cheap. Iraqi oil revenues, not American taxpayers, it was said, would cover the bills. “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon,” Wolfowitz declared.
Critics, and even supporters of the war, questioned such claims. Occupying an impoverished, politically fractious country of 24 million people, whose culture and languages are opaque to most Americans, was bound to be costly and difficult. At the time, administration spokesmen said that raising such concerns amounted to condoning despotism and terrorism. Now that the continuing loss of American lives and the staggering costs of ongoing occupation have borne out the skeptics, President Bush says that “this will take time and require sacrifice.” Yet he refuses to declare exactly how much time and who will be doing what sacrificing. Certainly, it won’t be the wealthiest Americans, who have been handed tax breaks by Bush for the last three years. When it comes to the cost of this war, it appears the president is content to leave the bill for future generations of middle- and working-class Americans, either through much higher taxes or diminished government services, or both. That is not leadership in a time of war, but connivance in a giant fraud. Bush’s penchant for casting his policies in lofty rhetoric while conducting his politics by subterfuge and with an eye for crude political advantage rightly offends many Americans.
Equally disingenuous is the president’s call for nations that were derided and ignored when the United States decided to go to war to help foot the bill for a policy they opposed. These traditional allies, especially France, have not always been disinterested critics of U.S. policy, but for the president to demand such support while refusing to share substantive decision-making authority in Iraq only seems like more of the bullying that made it impossible to forge a consensus in the UN Security Council last March.
President Bush has consistently obscured both the justification for and the cost of war in Iraq. Faced with the constitutional necessity of submitting a budget to Congress, he has finally presented his fellow citizens with an initial bill. It is not one most Americans will find easy to digest.
