February 02, 2007
Bush plans on requesting hundreds of billions more for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Reuters
reports that Bush is planning to ask for $100 billion more to fund the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan for this year (on top of $70 billion already recently requested), and hundreds of billions more to take it through 2008.
President George W. Bush will request slightly more than $100 billion to cover war operations in
Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of this year and an even larger amount for fiscal 2008 that begins on October 1, congressional sources said on Thursday.
The administration, which will submit the war cost proposals along with its annual budget on Monday, will provide details of its war spending plans to try to placate critics who have accused it of using a shadow budget to fund the war.
For the current fiscal year, the White House will ask Congress to approve an additional $93 billion for the Defense Department to conduct the two wars and about $7 billion for State Department activities, a Senate aide said.
Including other items, the request will total "a little over $100 billion," according to the Senate aide. That would come on top of $70 billion Congress already approved for the wars this year.
For 2008, the administration will ask for an amount "larger than the $100 billion in the fiscal 2007 request," the Senate aide said.
House and Senate aides said the administration was trying to detail the 2008 costs in advance, responding to complaints from Congress about the long line of "emergency" spending bills that have mostly funded the Iraq war since the U.S. invasion in 2003.
These are just "emergency" additions, not included in the regular budget. They are not included in the "regular" military budget of $500 billion or so, plus lots of "special ops", "intelligence", and other "classified" operations they're not telling us about. While the focus is on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is also involved in wars in Columbia, Somalia and god knows where else. Endless war, endless war, endless money, endless money ...
Naturally the Democrats will go along with it all. They're owned lock, stock and barrel by the military-industrial-financial-legal-corporate complex, and in their 200 year history have never met a war they didn't like. See these articles
"Democrats Sidestep Defunding Demands" and
Hillary Clinton calls Iran a threat to U.S., Israel" if you still have any doubts on that. All in all my estimate of America's total war budget is approaching a trillion dollars a year. And for wars that they are losing.
Remember Newton's laws of energy? "An object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an OUTSIDE FORCE. An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by an OUTSIDE FORCE."
And this doesn't include the costs of caring for the vets injured in these wars, of which there are at least 150,000 so far. At least 100,000 so far have been approved for disability claims. Those costs will continue for the life of the vets, decades at least. And it does not include the reparations that the US will be forced to pay sooner or later, since the entire thing is blatantly illegal. And if that isn't enough, it doesn't include the interest payments required to finance all of it, since all of this money is being borrowed, not paid through taxes. The total of these extra costs alone will be trillions over coming decades.
