With Latest Budget, Iraq Costs Top Vietnam War

[RedEarth]

This morning, the White House sent its $2.9 trillion budget proposal to Congress, requesting “an additional $100 billion for Iraq and the global war on terrorism this year, on top of $70 billion already sought. For 2008, that spending would drop to $145 billion and fall to $50 billion in 2009, although administration officials conceded that the 2008 and 2009 requests could go higher depending on the progress of the war effort.”

According to the Congressional Research Service, total spending on the Iraq war for fiscal years 2001 through 2006 was $318.5 billion. The Bush budget would bring total proposed spending in Iraq to $683 billion through 2009. Last month, the Los Angeles Times warned the cost of the Iraq war would soon eclipse the total amount spent on the Vietnam war:

By the time the Vietnam war ended in 1975, it had become America’s longest war, shadowed the legacies of four presidents, killed 58,000 Americans along with many thousands more Vietnamese, and cost the U.S. more than $660 billion in today’s dollars.

This budget would break that mark, and the spending blueprint does not take into account other costs of the Iraq war, such as future health care costs for injured soldiers.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/05/iraq-budget-vietnam/

[kenny blankenship]

1. In less than half the time too. That's real progress in counterinsurgency!