Bush Wants $50 Billion More for Iraq War
August 30th, 2007President Bush plans to ask Congress next month for up to $50 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq, a White House official said in yesterday’s The Washington Post, a move that appears to reflect increasing administration confidence that it can fend off congressional calls for a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces, according to the libertarian Cato Institute.
The request - which would come on top of about $460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget and $147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - is expected to be announced after congressional hearings scheduled for mid-September featuring the two top U.S. officials in Iraq. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will assess the state of the war and the effect of the new strategy the U.S. military has pursued this year.”
“With Iraq War costs approaching $500 billion, President Bush is expected to request at least $50 billion more. He does so while offering only more predictions of an impending breakthrough on security and political reconciliation that will eventually enable us to remove our troops from the country. The American people must be patient, he explains; the surge must be given more time to work,” Christopher Preble, Cato’s director of foreign policy studies, said in a statement released Wednesday.
“No one should be surprised that the president has yet again moved the goalposts, but the extent of this particular change is striking. When he announced the surge in January 2007, the president explained that improved security would be a catalyst for political reconciliation. It now seems certain that the Maliki government will not achieve most of its political benchmarks in the foreseeable future. It has gotten so bad that some U.S. political leaders and commentators are even calling for Maliki’s removal, a process that would only further undermine the prospects for an American withdrawal any time soon,” Preble says.
“But even the president’s claims that security in Iraq has improved are dubious. The Associated Press reports that the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running at nearly double the pace from a year ago,” Preble says. “It might be reasonable to expect the American people to be patient if the president’s past promises of progress hadn’t proved so disastrously wrong. As it is, the public sees no end in sight to this ruinous war.”
Tags: Iraq War
