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America’s big war spending continues under Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama
The war spending proposed by Obama is only slightly less than in each of the last two years of the administration of President George Bush and carries considerable political peril for the Democratic president who took office last year.
Obama campaigned for the White House vowing to end the Iraq war. His party has a large anti-war contingent that is wary of spending more money on the battlefield, and some of its leaders said they would carefully review the military budget.
US troops are to leave Iraq by the end of 2011, but Obama is seeking to escalate the US presence in Afghanistan to step up the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Obama announced in December he was adding 30,000 more US troops to the Afghan war effort to join the 68,000 already fighting a resurgent Taliban. He hopes to start bringing US troops home from Afghanistan in the middle of 2011.
To pay for the surge in Afghanistan, Obama on Monday asked for an additional $33 billion in the current 2010 fiscal year, on top of about $130 billion that Congress has already approved for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars through Sept. 30, 2010.
Pentagon chief Robert Gates said he would be asking Congress to approve this additional money soon to finance the new troop deployment in Afghanistan. “I will be asking the Congress to enact the supplemental by spring,” Gates told reporters.
Obama’s proposed budget will also include a request for $159.3 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the 2011 fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1. The peak for war funding in recent years was fiscal year 2008, Bush’s last year in office, when spending on war operations reached $185 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. This was slightly more than the appropriations in fiscal 2007, which were $171 billion.
The budget also includes a “placeholder” estimate of $50 billion for the year 2012 and beyond. But the administration’s budget documents noted that these estimates do not reflect any policy decisions about specific military or intelligence operations. Those decisions are yet to come.
While Obama said he planned to freeze many government domestic programs for three years, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reiterated her view that the Pentagon should not be exempt from such measures. “I look forward to examining the president’s proposal to freeze spending and believe waste can be found in all departments and agencies -- including the Defense Department,” she said. The budget includes a proposal for sharply more funding to help Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan arm, train and equip its military in the fight against extremists.
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