Iraq costs keep rising

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

"We've got to get on with it here and start acknowledging what some of these costs are going to be."

– Rep. Jim Kolbe, R- Ariz., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls foreign aid

Early in the invasion of Iraq, a steely-eyed President Bush said that the battle to liberate Iraq would go on "however long it takes." He should have said, "and however much it costs."

How much will it cost to secure and rebuild Iraq? It's a question the administration is uncomfortable answering, but members of both parties in Congress have grown insistent in asking.

The closest thing to an updated administration estimate came from the U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, in a recent CNBC interview in which he said that "getting the country up and running again" could cost "maybe $100 billion" over three years.

The Pentagon says U.S. military activities in Iraq will have cost $58 billion from January through September. But that's how much Congress provided for all anti-terror Defense Department activities this year -- including Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Brookings Institution sets the cost as high as $400 billion, while the American Academy of Arts and Sciences estimate goes as high as $615 billion over a decade.

On Friday Bush said that accurate cost projections would come "next year at the appropriate time."

The appropriate time for accurate cost projections is now. With a federal budget nearly $401 million in the red, the mission in Afghanistan far from complete and a new mission on the horizon in Liberia, the administration owes Americans a sound estimate of the costs -- no matter how unavoidable -- of the Iraq war and reconstruction.

[Note: This year's federal budget deficit is projected at $401 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It was incorrectly stated in the original publication of this article.]

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