Mother Jones hat eine sehr schöne Chronik der “Lügen” über den Irak-Krieg von August 1999 bis März 2003 publiziert und verspricht, sie weiterzuschreiben.
Harpers publiziert ein Gespräch mit Gordon Adams über die Kosten der Bush-Kriege. Adams vermerkt u.a. auf die Frage ” How much money has the United States spent fighting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader war on terrorism, and how much more can we expect will be allocated over the foreseeable future?”:
“Including all the funds Congress has voted this year, we will have spent $437 billion on Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the war on terror since 2001—about $1,500 for every American. All this despite Paul Wolfowitz’s promise that the war would be over quickly, the troops home soon, and that the reconstruction would be self-funding, thanks to the sale of Iraqi oil supplies. Back in 2003 the President’s economic advisor, Larry Lindsay, predicted that the Iraq adventure would cost more than $100 billion. He was fired, in part, for saying it, yet he greatly underestimated the cost. Spending on Iraq alone makes up over 70 percent of the $437 billion, with Afghanistan costing another 20 percent and the rest for counter-terror operations elsewhere in the world. Another way of looking at it is that funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror accounts for 20 percent of all the funds the Defense Department has spent over the past five years. The Congressional Research Service estimates conservatively that we might spend another $371 billion on these operations through 2016.” (…)
Virtually all of this money has been authorized by Congress as “emergency supplemental” funding. That is supposed to mean “we didn’t expect it and we need it right away, so don’t waste time with the normal budget process.” And that is how it has been done. The funding request is prepared at the top of the Defense Department, but does not go through the regular internal budget planning process; it is waved through the White House, and lands—with minimal justification—on congressional desks. Normally, the defense budget is reviewed three times—by the Budget Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and the Appropriations Committee. Emergency supplementals skip the first two committees and go straight to the money guys—the appropriators. Over the past five years, the appropriators have held virtually no public hearings on the Iraq money; they just mark it up and push it through for a vote. So nobody is minding the store the way they should. (…) The Defense Department, which has received over 90 percent of the $437 billion, has stiffed Congress for two years on a requirement that Congress voted into law to demand regular reporting on how they are spending the money. So, aside from anecdotal evidence, we don’t really know what happened with the money. The State Department reports every quarter on how it plans to spend the relatively small share of funds it has received for reconstruction in Iraq (about $27 billion). But it doesn’t tell Congress or the public how it was actually spent, and we rely on the small office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction to tell us how all that money is being spent.
