Tornado Alley (PROG)

[My Dime]

Rising, terrible cost of war

By Tom Hennessy
Staff columnist

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
The man who said that, on April 16, 1953, was Dwight D. Eisenhower. By then the former general was president of the United States.

But people, even presidents, sometimes say things that are quickly forgotten. On April 16, 2003, Congress approved $79 billion in the first of two supplemental appropriations to finance the war in Iraq.

If anyone in Congress noticed the irony 50 years from the day of Eisenhower's thoughtful comment I did not read about it. On Nov. 5, another $87 billion was appropriated for the war.

When I left home at about 8 Tuesday morning, the estimated cost of America's war in Iraq had reached $130,302,865,947.

When I left home Wednesday morning, about the same time, the estimated cost was at $130,421,659,244. What a difference a day makes.

I will explain momentarily how I keep track of the rising cost and tell you how to do the same.

Billion here, there

Save, perhaps, for politicians, most of us probably have difficulty measuring the true worth of a billion dollars. By way of illustration, let's take the $130,421,659,244 spent on the war up to Wednesday morning. The amount is equal, for example, to enrolling 18,422,845 children in the Head Start program for a year.


It is equal to the cost of providing a year of health insurance to 55,852,953 children.
It is equal to the cost of hiring 2,481,999 additional public school teachers for one year.
It is equal to the cost of providing 3,305,138 students with four-year scholarships at public universities.
It is equal to the cost of funding global anti-hunger efforts for five years.
It is equal to the cost of funding worldwide AIDS programs for 13 years.
It is equal to the cost of providing every child in the world with basic immunizations for 43 years.
How do I know?
As many of you might guess, I'm not smart enough to have done such calculations. The above figures, including the rising cost of the war, come from an ingenious Internet feature, the Cost of War calculator on www.costofwar.com

The figures are said to be the lowest estimate of what Congress approved in the two appropriations cited above.

The calculator was devised by Niko Matsakis of Boston and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, Md. A computer programmer and writer, respectively, they call themselves "citizen-activists who believe that everyone should know and understand the total financial cost of invading and occupying Iraq."

There is, of course, an additional cost of the war which cannot be measured in dollars not even billions. According to the last figure I saw Tuesday, 976 American men and women have died fighting this war.

They continue to die, despite the U.S. having returned sovereignty to the Iraqis, and 16 months after George Bush's camp proclaimed "Mission accomplished," American troops in Iraq are still being attacked an average of 60 times a day.

As the late Ernie Pyle said long ago, 'Here is your war."


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