Financial Times (London, England) October 27, 2004
White House to seek extra Dollars 70bn for war effort, general predicts
By Thomas Catan and Demetri Sevastopulo
The White House is expected to seek an additional Dollars 70bn in emergency funds from Congress to pay for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a US army general said yesterday.
The statement by General Paul Kern, who heads the US army materiel command, undercut efforts by the White House to play down reports already beginning to reverberate on the campaign trail that the cost of the Iraq war will rise further.
An administration official said it was premature to say how much emergency funding the White House would seek and that the figures being touted yesterday were purely "speculative".
"No final decision has been taken," he said. The White House was still in the process of "putting together numbers", he said, and would be likely to submit the next supplemental request for funding in January or February, if George W. Bush were re-elected.
The figure that the administration is reportedly seeking would be broadly in line with what it asked for to pay for the war effort in 2004. The rest of the Dollars 87bn (Euros 68bn, Pounds 47bn) supplemental request was earmarked for Iraqi reconstruction, something the White House says will not be included in this year's request.
If anything, analysts said, the figure was likely to be higher as the extended hostilities took their toll on the military. The army is reassessing its needs in the light of spreading Iraqi insurgency and the growing likelihood that it will be in the country for several years.
The military is "making a transition from a short-war mentality to a long-war mentality", said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org. For example, the military is seeking to add armour to its Humvees in Iraq and buy additional body armour for its troops. The marines, Mr Pike said, had expressed particular discontent with their kit and might need additional equipment.
The rising price of oil could also add billions to the fuel bill in Iraq. At the same time, the US is running out of its stockpiles of military hardware, which will need to be replenished.
Before the war, administration officials promised that the invasion and its aftermath would cost the US taxpayer little. "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon," Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, told Congress at the time.
Congress last October approved an Dollars 87bn supplemental budget for Iraq, including Dollars 66bn to cover military expenses and reconstruction and Dollars 18.4bn for reconstruction. But military costs have been higher than anticipated because of the insurgency.
In August Congress approved a further Dollars 25bn in spending to bridge the gap until the next supplemental request early next year. A Dollars 70bn request would bring the cost of the Iraq war to more than Dollars 225bn.
Democrats immediately seized on the report. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat leader of the House of Representatives, said the mounting price was the result of "poor planning" by the Bush administration.
"The war in Iraq has been and will continue to be much more expensive and last far longer than the administration originally intended," she said. "Sadly, no amount of supplemental funding will be able to compensate for the tremendous human cost of these mistakes."
© Copyright 2004, The Financial Times Limited
