WASHINGTON - How big is President George W
Bush's proposed 2008 Pentagon budget? At nearly
US$623 billion for the fiscal year that begins on
October 1, its size earned nothing but editorial
superlatives and a scramble for historical
precedents that could put the sum in perspective.
"Bush's defense budget biggest since
Reagan era," headlined The Washington Post, which
noted in its subtitle that "Iraq, Afghanistan
spending top Vietnam War".
The
Congressional Quarterly Today went even further
back, noting
that
"War spending would top Korea and Vietnam marks
...", while the venerable New York Times was
somewhat more restrained, noting only that the
total request constituted a "record".
Even
the far-right Washington Times seemed impressed,
noting in its sub-headline that "US allocation to
security programs exceeds rest of world combined"
and including in its lead paragraph the fact that
the total request marked "the largest sum in
inflation-adjusted dollars since 1946 ...", just
one year after World War II.
"What's
remarkable about this year's military budget is
that it's the largest budget since World War II,
but, of course, we're not fighting World War II,"
noted William Hartung, a defense expert at the
World Policy Institute in New York.
"We're
fighting terrorist networks armed with explosives
and AK-47s. This has to be considered a triumph of
an arms lobby that can obviously sell us things we
don't need at a time that the president claims
we're in mortal danger."
To put a
different perspective on the figure, $623 billion
is about $10 billion more than the total gross
domestic product (GDP) of all 47 countries in
sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa and oil
giants Nigeria and Angola, in 2005, according to
the World Bank.
Indeed, bank president
Paul Wolfowitz, who, until 2005, was the number
two man at the Pentagon, must be green with envy.
Total lending by the bank, the world's largest
single source of development assistance, is
currently running at about $23 billion a year, or
about 1/27th of the Pentagon's proposed resources.
Despite a jump of 12% in its proposed
budget over the fiscal 2006 budget, the State
Department must be suffering similar pangs.
Total State Department and related
international aid budgets would rise to a record
$36 billion under Bush's request, although about
$7.5 billion of that total will be earmarked for
military or security-related programs, such as
credits for foreign allies to buy equipment from
the Pentagon or US defense contractors or cash
grants to key partners in the administration's
"war on terror", such as Pakistan and Jordan, to
keep their economies afloat.
In addition,
Israel and Egypt, also allies in Bush's war, would
retain their status dating back to the late 1970s
as by far the biggest US bilateral aid recipients,
at $2.4 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively.
Of course, the cost of US military
operations in Afghanistan and Iraq far eclipses
what Washington provides in aid to even to its
most favored clients. Of the total Pentagon
requests for 2008, the two countries, where some
165,000 US troops are presently engaged, account
for $141 billion.
That means the Pentagon
expects to spend nearly $12 billion a month on the
two wars next year - or about $1 billion every
two-and-a-half days. By comparison, the State
Department has budgeted about $1 billion for
migration, refugee, and international disaster and
famine assistance for all of 2008.
"When
you compare the defense budget - which is our
hard-power face to the world - to our development
or disaster assistance budgets - which is our
soft-power face to the world - it's obviously very
lopsided," noted Sheila Heerling, a senior analyst
at the Center for Global Development in
Washington.
"It seems that when forced to
make a decision between short-term military gains
and longer-term development gains, the choice is
typically short-term military gains," she added.
The Pentagon actually expects to spend
even more on military operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan during the current year. Congress has
already approved $70 billion for the two wars this
year, but Bush has submitted a supplemental
request for another $93 billion, bringing the
total to $163 billion.
If all pending
administration requests are approved, total war
spending by the Pentagon since 2001 would rise to
a whopping $662 billion next year, surpassing the
cost of the Vietnam War (about $650 billion in
2007 dollars) and rivaling that of the Korean War.
In fact, analysts have already accused the
administration of low-balling its estimates. For
example, the 2007 supplemental request includes
$5.6 billion for Bush's plan to add 21,500 combat
troops to the 140,000 already stationed in Iraq.
But the non-partisan Congressional Budget
Office reported last week that such a "surge" -
even if it lasts only four months - will likely
cost twice as much due to the necessity of
deploying thousands of other units to carry out
support functions. If the deployment lasts longer,
as many experts believe it will, the costs will
mount accordingly.
Besides the cost of war
operations, the 2008 request for military spending
comes to $481 billion, an increase of 11% over
current 2007 levels, and roughly half of what the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
estimates as total defense spending by all
governments worldwide.
With the additional
spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, total US
military spending appears to be well above that of
all of the rest of the world's combined.
In addition, the administration has
announced it will push for expanding the size of
the army from 482,000 to 547,000 troops by 2012
and the Marine Corps from 174,000 to 202,000 over
the next four to five years.
"At a time
when public opinion polls show strong support for
a less militarized, less unilateral foreign
policy, this budget clearly takes us in the wrong
direction," according to Miriam Pemberton, an
analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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