The United States will have to approve a "massive" new spending bill of an estimated $1083 billion to meet its obligations in Iraq, a prominent US military analyst says. "We have to face that reality, and we did not face it last night" in US President George W Bush’s prime-time news conference on Iraq, Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies said. Taking issue with White House insistence that no new money would be needed until next year, Cordesman said with a recent upsurge in fighting and possible additional US troops, there was a need for a massive supplemental, or emergency funding bill in Congress. "Virtually everyone in Washington knows this," he told a gloomy CSIS programme entitled "Iraq: On the Precipice of Failure?" For the military budget alone, that meant "a minimum of $US50 billion. If we add aid and external costs, that supplemental will probably be $US70 billion," he said.
The Bush administration has publicly ruled out sending a new Iraq spending request to Congress before January 2005, after the November presidential election. "With the information we have currently, we are still planning on coming to Congress with a supplemental request in calendar year ’05," Chad Kolton, spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said. But Cordesman said the government would have to act sometime in the next four months and that additional aid would be needed next year as well.
Bush won approval from Congress last year for two war supplementals - one for $US79 billion and another for $US87.5 billion for military operations, homeland security and reconstruction efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The wartime spending drew fire from Bush’s Democratic challengers, and analysts say the $US87.5 billion request helped erode Bush’s approval ratings in some polls as Americans suffered high unemployment and sluggish economic growth. A Republican congressional aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that even before the latest violence in Iraq, some on Capitol Hill were wondering if the administration would seek another Iraq supplemental earlier than the beginning of 2005. The White House had offered assurances that would not be necessary. "After the recent events, I would expect that the talk about the need for a new supplemental might pick up again when Congress comes back (from a spring recess next week)," the congressional official said. |