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Democrats Give White House Another Blank-Check For Iraq
by Jason Leopold
A Democratic engineered emergency supplemental bill to continue funding the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan to the tune of $162 billion is expected to win bipartisan support, aides to leaders in the House said late Wednesday.
The bill, as currently drafted, does not contain any conditions for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq nor does it restrict how President Bush can conduct military operations. The legislation ensures both wars are funded well into 2009 and comes nearly two years after Democrats won majorities in Congress and the Senate largely on promises to resist handing the Bush administration "blank-checks" for Iraq and a pledge to immediately bring U.S. troops home.
A spokesperson for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was unavailable for comment.
In
a column published on The Huffington Post in November 2006, just a
couple of weeks after Democrats took back control of Congress, Pelosi
wrote "that the biggest ethical issue facing our country for the past
three and a half years is the war in Iraq."
"This unnecessary
pre-emptive war has come at great cost. Nearly 2,900 of our brave
troops have lost their lives and more than 21,000 more have suffered
lasting wounds," Pelosi wrote." Since the war began, Congress has
appropriated more than $350 billion, and the United States has suffered
devastating damage to our reputation in the eyes of the world."
Since
she published that column an additional 1,200 U.S. troops died in Iraq
and nearly 10,000 more were wounded, according to statistics released
by the Defense Department. Additionally, tens of thousands of Iraqis
civilians have been killed since the March 2003 invasion. Moreover, if
the new supplemental passes it will bring the total costs of the war to
more than $600 billion.
Congressional leaders intend to hand the
legislation to the Senate Thursday. The White House indicated Bush will
sign the legislation into law if it passes both Houses, which
Democratic leaders said is the likely outcome.
House Majority
Leader Steny Hoyer told Reuters the bipartisan legislation tackles
"important domestic needs" in addition to the war funding. Hoyer and
House Minority Leader John Boehner, (R-Ohio), announced the compromise
between their political parties.
The latest round of funding
comes two weeks after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
issued a scathing prewar Iraq intelligence report that accused Bush,
Vice President Cheney, and other senior administration officials of
knowingly lying to the public and Congress about Iraq's arsenal of
chemical and biological weapons as well as its ties to the terrorist
group al-Qaeda in order to win support for a U.S. led invasion.
The
bill includes a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits, $2.6
billion to address Midwest flooding, and $63 billion to fund college
tuition for Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The White House backed
off its demand that Democrats remove from the supplemental funding for
domestic issues. The Democratic leadership in turn told the White House
that they would not attach conditions or timetables to the final
legislation, aides to Democratic leaders said.
Since Democrats
took control of Congress they have failed at every instance in standing
up to White House demands that they provide emergency funding for the
occupation of Iraq without conditions such as benchmarks calling for a
timetable to withdraw troops.
Moreover, Democrats have failed
to rein in the Bush administration's use of emergency supplemental
appropriations, despite repeated warnings to do so, to fund the
five-year-old war in Iraq and the seven-year conflict in Afghanistan
may have wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, according to the CRS, an
investigative arm of Congress.
“Over 90 percent of [the Defense
Department] funds were provided as emergency funds in supplemental or
additional appropriations; the remainder were provided in regular
defense bills or in transfers from regular appropriations,” said the
CRS report, issued in February.
“Emergency funding is exempt
from ceilings applying to discretionary spending in Congress’s annual
budget resolutions. Some Members have argued that continuing to fund
ongoing operations in supplementals reduces congressional oversight.”
Veronique
de Rugy, a senior research fellow and budget scholar at the Mercatus
Center at George Mason University, said funding the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars through emergency legislation is both unusual and
troubling because it complicates tracking the real cost.
“While
other wars have initially been funded using emergency supplementals,
they have quickly been incorporated into the regular budget,” de Rugy
said. “Never before has emergency supplemental spending been used to
fund an entire war and over the course of so many years.”
De Rugy published an article on this topic, “The Trillion-Dollar War,” in the May issue of Reason magazine.
Skyrocketing Costs
The CRS report also questioned the reasons behind the skyrocketing costs for the wars.
“Although
some of the factors behind the rapid increase in DOD funding are known
— the growing intensity of operations, additional force protection gear
and equipment, substantial upgrades of equipment, converting units to
modular configurations, and new funding to train and equip Iraqi
security forces — these elements” fail to justify the increase, the CRS
said.
Furthermore, a $70 billion “placeholder” request included
in the fiscal year 2009 budget that the Pentagon says will be used to
finance operations in Iraq does not include any details on how the
money will be spent “making it impossible to estimate its allocation,”
according to the report.
The CRS added that the Pentagon has
used these emergency supplemental requests to get Congress to fund
equipment and vehicle upgrades that would otherwise come out of the
Pentagon’s annual budget.
“Although some of this increase may
reflect additional force protection and replacement of ‘stressed’
equipment, much may be in response to [Deputy Secretary of Defense
Gordon] England’s new guidance to fund requirements for the ‘longer
war’ rather than DOD’s traditional definition of war costs as strictly
related to immediate war needs,” the CRS said.
“For example, the
Navy initially requested $450 million for six EA-18G aircraft, a new
electronic warfare version of the F-18, and the Air Force $389 million
for two Joint Strike Fighters, an aircraft just entering production;
such new aircraft would not be delivered for about three years and so
could not be used to meet immediate war needs,” the CRS said.
The
CRS recommended that Congress immediately begin to demand more
transparent accounting of the Pentagon’s “emergency” spending in order
to prevent any cost-shifting chicanery.
These dire warnings from
the Bush administration – about troops in a war zone running out of
money – have become routine since Democrats won control of Congress in
November 2006 and were reiterated by the president in his June 7 weekly
radio address.
"If Congress does not act, critical accounts at
the Department of Defense will soon run dry. At the beginning of next
month, civilian employees may face temporary layoffs. The department
will have to close down a vital program that is getting potential
insurgents off the streets and into jobs. The Pentagon will run out of
money it needs to support critical day-to-day operations that help keep
our Nation safe. And after July, the department will no longer be able
to pay our troops — including those serving in Afghanistan and Iraq,"
Bush said.
But the GAO warned in a letter to Congress on March
17, that the war funding that the Pentagon requested was based on
“unreliable” financial data and should be considered an “approximation.”
Democrats apparently have not addressed the issue.
Some
academic studies have projected the total cost of the Iraq War soaring
past $2 trillion. However, the Congressional Budget Office said trying
to estimate future costs for the war is difficult “because DOD has
provided little detailed information on costs incurred to date.”
Last update : Thursday, June 19, 2008
The Public Record
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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