How is money actually being spent on the Iraqi war?

JonnyPistachio

So, I was just thinking as i rea din another thread that the US govt is spending something like $8 billion/month in iraq.

I just cant fathom how/when/where EIGHT BILLION dollars can go. I ask, how is it broken down? What are the top major expenses in this war? I guess i'll do some google searching, but i'm curious what you all think. this is insane when you REALLY think about the spending.

Piper At The Gates

A large portion of that money is going to paying off the people we used to call insurgents and terrorists. We are paying them around $350.00 each, per month, to not attack us and to form militia's that basically do nothing.
Then, of course, Halliburton and Dick Cheney are getting billions for 'Support Services' that are just no-bid, and sometimes no-show, contracts.
Nice work if you can get it.

Cosmo

JonnyPistachio wrote:

So, I was just thinking as i rea din another thread that the US govt is spending something like $8 billion/month in iraq.

I just cant fathom how/when/where EIGHT BILLION dollars can go. I ask, how is it broken down? What are the top major expenses in this war? I guess i'll do some google searching, but i'm curious what you all think. this is insane when you REALLY think about the spending.

...
My guess... since there is an 'invisible' army of contractors over there... a lot is going to the contractors.
One of the gripes the U.S. regulars complain about is the salaries of the contractors (formerly known as 'Mercenaries') who did the same job... or less... than the regular soldiers.
I don't know why we don't just hire Iraqis to drive the trucks.

RolandTD20Kdrummer

Piper At The Gates wrote:

A large portion of that money is going to paying off the people we used to call insurgents and terrorists. We are paying them around $350.00 each, per month, to not attack us and to form militia's that basically do nothing.

yes...yes...the surge is working!!!

we just have to pay them to like us....

see...the surge is working!

When you're rich...who givers a shit about the poor...

beachdweller

we should pay criminals in our counrty to not be criminals, genious of an idea...

digster

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf

As far as I understand, it's good as of May 2008. Maybe not the most accurate representation as far as can be measured, but it's a pretty good measurement of where we are.

Another good, admittedly partisan website that breaks it down to the second: http://theiraqinsider.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-much-does-iraq-war-cost-per-month.html

OffHeGoes29

You have no idea what it cost to just send 12 fighter aircraft for 3 months over there. Unreal how much it cost to operate shit like that.

g under p

OffHeGoes29 wrote:

You have no idea what it cost to just send 12 fighter aircraft for 3 months over there. Unreal how much it cost to operate shit like that.

The US only needs 12 fighter aircrafts for 3 months?

Peace

Wobbie

They say the war in Iraq is costing taxpayers about $2 Billion dollars per week. There are 3,600 seconds in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week for a total of 604,800 seconds per week. At $2 Billion per week, the Iraq War costs us over $3,000 every second! Can I borrow a couple of bucks for the rent this month?

In other words, we probably just spent $75,000 on the war, in the time it took to read this :mad:

OffHeGoes29

g under p wrote:

The US only needs 12 fighter aircrafts for 3 months?

Peace

No, we have more than that there. I'm just talking about small numbers that come and go.

DriftingByTheStorm

100,000 troops at $500 a week would be 50 Million a week (or a little over 200 million a month) just in basic pay to troops.

You have to figure some percentage of those troops are making significantly more than that (like the officers) ...

and then you figure HOW MUCH GAS (and jet fuel) does it cost to run all of that fucking equipment, and you're getting a good part of the way there.

Munitions aren't exactly cheap either.

OffHeGoes29

DriftingByTheStorm wrote:

100,000 troops at $500 a week would be 50 Million a week (or a little over 200 million a month) just in basic pay to troops.

You have to figure some percentage of those troops are making significantly more than that (like the officers) ...

and then you figure HOW MUCH GAS (and jet fuel) does it cost to run all of that fucking equipment, and you're getting a good part of the way there.

Munitions aren't exactly cheap either.

They make a whole lot more over there then you know. And you can't count things like basic pay, they get that regardless if they are overseas or not.

jeffbr

Cosmo wrote:

...
My guess... since there is an 'invisible' army of contractors over there... a lot is going to the contractors.
One of the gripes the U.S. regulars complain about is the salaries of the contractors (formerly known as 'Mercenaries') who did the same job... or less... than the regular soldiers.
I don't know why we don't just hire Iraqis to drive the trucks.

This drives me nuts, and I'm certain that between this and paying off the insurgents we are burning through more cash than people could believe.

Here's a great article written by Matt Taibbi (my current favorite journalist) that he wrote for Rolling Stone mag last year: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle

Here are just a few excerpts from an article filled with these tidbits:

In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O'Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O'Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron's moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan's community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was . . . an anti-smoking campaign.

The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the "entrepreneurship" of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent "three sleepless nights" putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking "like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later." The two simply "presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."

Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. "Yes -- $100 bills in plastic wrap," Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. "We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while."

There isn't a brazen, two-bit, purse-snatching money caper you can think of that didn't happen at least 10,000 times with your tax dollars in Iraq. At the very outset of the occupation, when L. Paul Bremer was installed as head of the CPA, one of his first brilliant ideas for managing the country was to have $12 billion in cash flown into Baghdad on huge wooden pallets and stored in palaces and government buildings. To pay contractors, he'd have agents go to the various stashes -- a pile of $200 million in one of Saddam's former palaces was watched by a single soldier, who left the key to the vault in a backpack on his desk when he went out to lunch -- withdraw the money, then crisscross the country to pay the bills. When desperate auditors later tried to trace the paths of the money, one agent could account for only $6,306,836 of some $23 million he'd withdrawn. Bremer's office "acknowledged not having any supporting documentation" for $25 million given to a different agent. A ministry that claimed to have paid 8,206 guards was able to document payouts to only 602. An agent who was told by auditors that he still owed $1,878,870 magically produced exactly that amount, which, as the auditors dryly noted, "suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash."
In short, some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. "Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. "But that's exactly what our government did."

Read the article and it will (or should!) make your blood boil. That is my money. That is your money. It is a bullshit war, being fought for bullshit reasons, and being managed in an extremely criminal manner. I'm sure there will be no accountability.

Wobbie

this crap adds up, too....



1) Halliburton billed taxpayers $1.4 billion in questionable and undocumented charges under its contract to supply troops in Iraq, as documented by the Pentagon’s own auditors. More…


6) Halliburton charged taxpayers for services that it never provided and tens of thousands of meals that it never served. More…



7) Halliburton double-charged taxpayers for $617,000 worth of soda. More…



8) Halliburton tripled the cost of hand towels, at taxpayer expense, by insisting on having its own embroidered logo on each towel. More…



9) Halliburton employees burned new trucks on the side of the road because they didn’t have the right wrench to change a tire — and knew that the trucks could be replaced on a profitable “cost-plus” basis, at taxpayer expense. More…



10) Halliburton employees dumped 50,000 pounds of nails in the desert because they ordered the wrong size, all at taxpayer expense. More…



11) Halliburton employees threw themselves a lavish Super Bowl Party, but passed the cost on to taxpayers by claiming they had purchased supplies for the troops. More…



12) Halliburton chose a subcontractor to build an ice factory in the desert even though its bid was 800 percent higher than an equally qualified bidder. More…



13) Halliburton actively discouraged cooperation with U.S. government auditors, sent one whistleblower into a combat zone to keep him away from auditors, and put another whistleblower under armed guard before kicking her out of the country. More…


15) Halliburton’s no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure was the worst case of contract abuse that the top civilian at the Army Corps of Engineers had ever seen. She was demoted after speaking out. More…



16) Under its no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure contract, Halliburton overcharged by over 600 percent for the delivery of fuel from Kuwait. More…

fuck

JonnyPistachio wrote:

So, I was just thinking as i rea din another thread that the US govt is spending something like $8 billion/month in iraq.

I just cant fathom how/when/where EIGHT BILLION dollars can go. I ask, how is it broken down? What are the top major expenses in this war? I guess i'll do some google searching, but i'm curious what you all think. this is insane when you REALLY think about the spending.

are you questioning this war? It's a task from God, forget how much it costs! It costs a lot to "liberate" a country.

Thorns2010

I should ask my brother if he has insight on all of this.

He works for the Army Core of Engineers, and was in Iraqi from Feb-July of this year.