This year’s proposed US spending on the Iraq war is larger than the military budgets of China and Russia combined. The combined spending requests would push the total for Iraq to US$564 billion, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS).

Total proposed US military spending for 2008 is larger than military spending by all of the other nations in the world combined. It is:

•10 times the military budget of the second-largest military spending country in the world, China;

•larger than the combined gross domestic products of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa;

•more than 30 times higher than all spending on State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined;

•more than 120 times higher than the roughly $5 billion per year the US government spends on combatting global warming

According to an April 27 article “Iraq war: a nice little earner” in Asia Times Online by Ismael Hossein-zadeh, an economics professor at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, said:

Although the official military budget already eats up the lion’s share of the public money (crowding out vital domestic needs), it nonetheless grossly understates the true magnitude of military spending. The real national defense budget, according to Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, is nearly twice as much as the official budget.
The reason for this understatement is that the official Department of Defense budget excludes not only the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a number of other major cost items.

That sort of money could go a long way to addressing so many of the world’s most urgent problems. But war is a very profitable business for some very big and powerful corporations such as Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Vinnell and Blackwater. It has been argued that rather than profiteering from war, these corporations are making war for profit. Many of them would not exist as we know them without war.

Halliburton alone has already taken more than $13 billion from no-bid/no-audit US government contracts for providing everything from pizzas to security personnel in Iraq.

US Vice President and former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney currently holds 100,000 shares of unexercised stock options in Halliburton with a gross value of $3.2 million.

So the term “capitalist war-mongers” isn’t just a slogan — it’s a statement of an ugly reality.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.