www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,18028837-38198,00.html
News Home | Story US counts war cost: $585bn From: From correspondents in Washington February 04, 2006 PRESIDENT George W Bush is about to ask Congress for another $160 billion ($US120 billion) for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing their total cost so far to $585 billion. That is enough to fully fund global anti-hunger efforts for more than 13 years and provide every child in the world with basic immunisation for more than a century. Most of the money is for Iraq, where expenses are about $6 billion a month, according to administration officials. The US campaign in Afghanistan is costing about $1 billion a month. White House budget office deputy director Joel Kaplan said yesterday that Mr Bush would seek a quick infusion of $93 billion, plus another $66 billion as part of the proposed fiscal 2007 federal budget that will go to Congress on Monday. Whether you're for the war or against the war, that's a fact," said Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan organisation that advocates balanced federal budgets. The latest figures, provided by officials from the Pentagon and the White House budget office, are a far cry from the Administration's pre-war estimates.
White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey was pushed out of his job when he suggested in September 2002 that the Iraq war could cost as much as $265billion. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put the figure at about $66 billion, but told Congress that no one could be sure. "It's not knowable what a war or conflict like that is going to cost. You don't know if it's going to last two days or two weeks or two months. It's certainly not going to last two years, but it's going to cost money," Mr Rumsfeld said six months before the invasion in March 2003. In that same period, Mr Rumsfeld's then-deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, contended that post-war Iraqi oil sales would pay for the war.
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