WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US government triggered a bruising new battle with Congress Wednesday by demanding the mammoth sum of nearly 190 billion dollars to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The administration's largest funding request yet for the six-year-old "war on terror" came as Democrats battled to pursue a thus-far futile drive to curtail the bloody Iraq mission.
The 2008 budget request was announced by the Pentagon, which also revealed that US military commanders have been warned that they are responsible for overseeing private security contractors in Iraq, a move that comes in the wake of the September 16 shootout in Baghdad involving the Blackwater company that left at least 10 Iraqis dead.
At the United Nations on Tuesday, President George W. Bush assured Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of Washington's support, aides said, despite US public anger at the war and the sluggish pace of Iraqi progress on legislation seen as key to forging national unity and quelling sectarian violence.
Addressing the UN Wednesday, Maliki said his country's neighbors realized the dangers of extremist violence on their doorstep as he urged the world body to boost efforts to rebuild the fractured nation.
Even as Maliki spoke, the country was hit the same day with another spate of powerful car and suicide bombings which killed at least 36 people.
The UN has been under strong pressure also from the United States to adopt a higher profile in Iraq, with the Bush administration under intense military strain from the costly war.
But in the US Senate also on Wednesday, a non-binding resolution was passed in favor of subdividing Iraq on ethnic lines, a plan touted by backers as the sole hope of forging a federal state out of sectarian strife.
It proposes to separate Iraq into Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni entities, with a federal government in Baghdad in charge of border security and oil revenues.
The Bush government's proposed budget increase brought a sharp rebuff from Democrats in the Congress.
As Defense Secretary Robert Gates laid out his case for the extra money in a Senate hearing, senior Democrat Robert Byrd said the "nefarious, infernal war in Iraq" had now cost more than 450 billion dollars on its own.
"In the fifth year of this terrible, misguided conflict, this senator -- yes, this man from the hill country -- believes that it is time for a thorough evaluation of the Bush war in Iraq," the West Virginia senator told Gates.
"If we're serious about supporting our troops, we owe them nothing less."
The Pentagon's budget submission was 42.3 billion dollars greater than the administration's estimate when it presented its first 2008 budget request to the Democratic-led Congress in February.
"This additional 42.3 billion dollars puts us at just under 190 billion dollars for the global war on terror supplemental request for 2008 -- 189.3 billion dollars," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters.
Gates said the increase was needed in part to cover the cost of maintaining the so-called "surge" in US forces at least through July 2008, as well as to buy mine-resistant armored vehicles known as MRAPs.
Currently there are 165,000 US troops in Iraq, organized into around 20 combat brigades.
General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, earlier this month announced plans to reduce the size of the force by five brigades by mid-July, which would bring force levels down to around 130,000 troops.
The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is funded separately from the regular Pentagon budget. The mammoth new request was sure to run into a firestorm in Congress, although the Democrats have so far proven unable to lure enough Republicans away from Bush's Iraq strategy.
Senator Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' frontrunner in the 2008 White House race, says she will vote to halt war spending and curtail Bush's "failed policy" by starting to bring US troops home.
"There is no military solution (in Iraq)," Clinton told CBS in one of a blizzard of television interviews Sunday, arguing US troops were stuck in "a sectarian civil war."
"I voted against funding last spring. I will vote against funding again in the absence of any change in policy," she said, defending an evolution in her thinking since she backed Bush's drive for war in a 2002 Senate vote.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
