"US officials this week (...) acknowledged the surging financial cost of military operations and of rebuilding Iraq, with an estimated $US4 billion spent each month on the military alone [Rumsfeld's estimate is US$3.9 billion a month]. Paul Bremer, the US administrator for Iraq, warned last week that reconstruction would cost "several tens of billions of dollars". "This is taking its toll, I think, on the American attitude toward what we're doing there," Senator Richard ["Dick"] Durbin [Democrats, Illinois] told ABC about the mounting costs and casualties. "I hope the Bush administration will have a change of heart and a change of direction and start bringing in troops from other nations, so that American soldiers can be safer, and other American soldiers can come home." From: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/01/1062383510652.html
You can sort of start to see why the US Government wants the rest of the world to help out with "liberatory regime change" in Iraq. According to SIPRI, world military spending rose by 6 per cent in 2002, growing twice as fast as in 2001 to reach $794 billion, largely as a result of the US-led war on terrorism (three-quarters of the increase). Russia has overtaken the US as the world's largest arms exporter while China was the largest importer followed by India (According to the Grimmett Report, the US "market share" of global weaponry export agreements was 60% in 1993 and 50% in 2000). With outlays increasing 10 per cent year-on-year, the US accounted for 43 per cent of global military expenditure in 2002, up from 36 per cent in 2001. West European Nato spending however fell by 3 per cent in real terms between 2000 and 2002. See further http://projects.sipri.org/milex.html (In 1993-2000, the US made more than US$101 billion worth of weapons export agreements, far exceeding Russia ($36.3 billion), France ($31.8 billion), Germany ($14 billion), Britain ($13.8 billion) and China ($7.6 billion); The United States accounts for more than half the total value of arms transfer agreements with the Near East during the 1993-2000 period, somewhere around US$55. At the Costs of War site http://www.costofwar.com/ you can follow the increase in the cost of the war in whole US dollars per second. When I last looked it was about US$71.8 billion. For this money you could hire about a million school teachers for a year. 22 million children could be provided with health care for a year, 7.2 preschool kids could attend headstart programmes, 12.8 million cars could be converted to natural gas, and 733,000 units of affordable housing could be built. The estimated cost escalation is based on data from the Congressional Budget Office, most recently adjusted on 5 August. As we know, the war offensive started on 19 March 2003. If I am not much mistaken, that's 166 days of regime change so far, and that implies an average cost of US$ 433 million per day of regime change. Suppose this goes on till the end of the year at the current rate, then you might have spent another US$53 billion. The total spending of the US government in 2003 is estimated at $US 2128 billion, so that the military spending on war so far has cost somewhere around 3.4 percent of the total US Government Budget, and if the war continues until the end of the year, then we might be looking at a figure of 6 percent of the total US Government Budget, or a little over one percent of the total Gross Domestic Product of the United States - US government spending is about 20 percent of US GDP. At this US Government site, you can find more US budget information: http://w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2003/hist.html At the UK defence information site http://www.armedforces.co.uk/mod/listings/l0012.html you can find some comparisons of UK defence budgets. According to the IISS site, http://www.iiss.org/iraqCrisis-more.php?itemID=42 the total US Defence budget for 2003 is $396bn (about 3.8 percent of total US GDP). The cost of the Iraq war, so far, must be therefore in the region of one-fifth of the total annual Defence Budget of the United States of America, and in turn, this total annual Defence Budget is nearly one-fifth of the entire US Government Budget. Of course there are problems with these comparisons. There was a lot of money spent not just on the US Armed Forces, but also on the political, intelligence and diplomatic preparation of the war, but this is not accounted for as a "military cost", and also, costs have escalated as regime change became more successful, they could escalate more, in which case the counter ought to spin faster. Secondly, by the time I have finished this mail, the figures I have provided are already out of date. The fiscal 2003 Supplemental Appropriations Bill allocated US$62.4 billion to Defence, but it looks like that budget on its own has been exceeded already. At the Iraq Body Count site, http://www.iraqbodycount.net/bodycount.htm you can follow the estimated number of civilian casualties per second, with minimum and maximum estimated tallies. When I looked, the estimated minimum carnage was 6118 and the estimated maximum carnage was 7836. Casualty figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of online media reports and eyewitness accounts. All results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least two members of the Iraq Body Count project team in addition to the original compiler before publication. That is about 37-47 civilians per day. At http://www.antiwar.com/ewens/casualties.html the total number of Americans deaths is given as 281 since March 20, and the total wounded stands at 1027, but like I say the figures just keep going up. How about profits ? Oil prices rose in the first quarter of 2003 and Exxon Mobil said pre-tax profits for the first quarter were US$7.04bn, up from $2.1bn dollars in 2002/1. British oil giant BP made $3.7bn up from US$2.7 billion in 2002/1. Shell said that net profits were $3.9bn up from US$1.9bn in 2002/1. (BBC Reports) Restoring Iraq's oil fields to pre-1991 production levels is thought to cost $5 billion with $3 billion more in annual operating expenses. Corporations like Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, United Defense Industries etc. are all making big profits and share prices are high. Jurriaan Shadoobie, my brain's been battered - Rolling Stones, "Shattered"
