$843 billion and counting...
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/badguys/061025/the_cost_since_911_1.htm
The Cost Since 9/11
Ever wonder what Iraq and the war on terrorism have cost the United States? I don't mean in Americans' lost sense of security or in our plummeting image around the world. I'm talking about cold, hard cash. How much extra has Washington spent since 9/11 for homeland security, new foreign aid, bigger intelligence agencies, more military, overthrowing the Taliban, toppling Saddam Hussein, and fighting the Iraq insurgency?
Take a guess, and then read on ...
It turns out that analysts at the nonprofit Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments have done such a study, which was widely overlooked when released on September 7. The CSBA is one of those Washington, D.C., gems, a small, quiet research institute that, year after year, offers the public dependable, nonpartisan studies on military spending, with particularly valuable insights into the Pentagon's massive "black" budget–those classified programs with little oversight and often runaway spending. Without groups like CSBA, journalists like me would be lost, trying on deadline to make sense of arcane budget hearings and hundreds of pages of minutiae on military programs.
CSBA's Director of Budget Studies Steven Kosiak decided to look at just how much Washington has spent since 9/11. He took the budget figure for the year before the 2001 attack, and, after adjusting for inflation, plotted it out over the next five years. Then he compared that with the actual funding, spread out over annual budgets and a host of supplemental appropriations, which have often hidden the true costs.
So what did you guess? $100 billion more? $500 billion more?
Keep going ... The price tag since 9/11 is $843 billion, according to Kosiak. That's bigger than the combined gross domestic products of most of the world's Arab nations last year.
Now, no one ought to doubt that some funding increases were needed–Americans woke up to a new world on 9/12, with plenty of bad guys out there deserving our belated attention. One could almost forgive the fact that the spending has turned the federal budget from a $100 billion surplus to a $300 billion deficit. But here's the rub: Surprisingly, most of the money hasn't gone to fight terrorism.
Kosiak writes that "although the terrorist attacks of 9/11 may have been the major catalyst for this funding growth, only about one third of the $843 billion ... has been used to cover the cost of programs and activities clearly and closely related to recovering from and responding to those attacks, or protecting the U.S. homeland from future terrorist attacks." That includes hunting al Qaeda suspects at home and overseas, shoring up U.S. homeland defense, and ousting the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. So where did all the money go?
Some $310 billion–or 37 percent–has gone into Iraq, largely to fund military operations for that ill-fated adventure. An additional $274 billion–or 33 percent–has gone to fund general increases in the Pentagon's budget, for modernization programs and various operations and support activities. While some of those billions may indeed help fight the war on terrorism, most of it is aimed at bulking up the U.S. military to fight not counterterrorism or counterinsurgencies but conventional wars, according to the study.
Many counterterrorism experts are convinced that getting at the roots of radical Islam requires foremost not a military solution but a political and cultural one–that Washington needs to wage a war of ideas, much as it did during the Cold War. Key to this effort, they say, is an increase in foreign aid and diplomatic efforts. So how much extra has gone to foreign aid and diplomacy, outside of Iraq? About $7 billion, or less than 1 percent.
BAD GUY OF THE WEEK: Money launderers are an ingenious bunch. Some use gold and diamonds to launder their ill-gotten gains. Others wash their dirty cash through underground hawala banks or black-market peso exchanges. But the Bad Guys Blog gives a tip of its fedora to attorney Stephen Plowman of Medina, Wash., who pleaded guilty last week for failing to report receipt of over $100,000 from a convicted drug dealer – money meant to buy a Seattle laundromat that would be used to wash money. The cash came from Plowman's client, convicted cocaine trafficker Carlos Ford, who thought the Queen Anne Maytag Laundry seemed like a pretty good deal. Meanwhile, looks as if it's open season on lawyers taking dirty money. Plowman is the fourth attorney in the past year who has pleaded guilty to financial crimes tied to drug trafficking, according to the Justice Department.
