$45 million per plane + $10 million to train the pilot. No one ever said that war was cheap.
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September 18, 1996
CLINTON ECONOMICS OF PUNISHING SADDAM!
by William Heartstone, Staff Writer
WASHINGTON DESK - The Clinton White House military build-up to harass Iraq's president Saddam Hussein has turned into a multibillion dollar spending machine. Are American taxpayers aware of the fact that president Clinton's foreign policy disaster has created a fiscal crisis in the White House?
The cost of sabre-rattling in the Persian Gulf is very high for U.S. taxpayers. Was this money well spent? For example, tax money spent by the Clinton White House for the jet fuel to deploy the eight F117A Stealth fighters and get them to Kuwait plus the B52s already totals more than $1 billion dollars. Congress was not consulted nor has Congress approved the Clinton action.
The non-stop 20-hour journey of eight Stealth fighters from Holloman air force base in New Mexico to Kuwait involved a dozen air refuelling tankers, a mixture of KC135s from McConnell air force base in Kansas and KC10s from McGuire air force base in New Jersey, according to a spokesman for the United States Air Mobility Command in Illinois.
The BBC reported Monday that Paul Beaver, a defense expert with the Jane's group, said the average cost of a combat aircraft in flight was about $15,000 an hour, excluding the pilot's salary. It costs $10 million to train a Stealth fighter pilot.
The two Clinton administration deployments of B52s has cost even more. The spokesman for the Air Mobility Command which operates all the tankers for mid-air refuelling, said the two B52s which flew non-stop from Guam in the Pacific to mount a cruise missile attack on Iraqi air defense systems before flying straight back to Guam, used up 1.5 million pounds of fuel. Far more tankers were needed for the B52 operation than for the trip by the Stealth fighters, the spokesman said.
The two B52s also fired 13 AGM86C cruise missiles, each costing $1.2 million, according to the Pentagon.
Bob Dole, interviewed on ABC's Good Morning America program, ridiculed the use of million-dollar missiles to attack what he said were $60,000 radar sites. "That's not very good economics," he said, adding that Iraq would apparently be able to repair the radar sites in three days.
The cost of operating a carrier battle group in the Gulf is $1,000,000.00 a day, a spokesman for the US Navy said, although this does not involve additional costs, because the ships and 11,000 naval personnel would be on operational duty elsewhere if they were not in the Persian Gulf region. The cost of the 44 guided missiles that president Clinton ordered to be fired on Iraq last week has totaled more than $66 millions.
However, the ships have so far fired a total of 31 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraqi targets, each costing $600,000. Most of the cost of Operation against the Iraqi leader, is in addition to the annual bill for committing American military personnel and equipment to the US Central Command region that covers southwest Asia. Before the current Clinton administration foreign policy disassters in Kuwait and Iraq, spending for 1996 military operations totalled more than $490 million.
On Monday, the Pentagon added to the overall bill by preparing to send about 3,000 additional troops to Kuwait to take part in an exercise code called Intrinsic Action. A spokesman for the Pentagon was or unwilling to give the Daily Republican reporters the cost of the deployment.
The arrival of a second carrier battle group in the Gulf from the Adriatic will also double the daily cost of the naval operation. However, the Tarawa Amphibious Readiness Group, which has been in the Gulf in the last few weeks, has now moved away to the South Pacific.
The campaign against Saddam does not only involve the Pentagon. The CIA, under director John Deutch, has also been engaged in building up an organization in northern Iraq in the last five years to engineer the downfall of the Iraqi dictator. The estimated cost of the CIA operation since the Gulf War ended in 1991 is about $100 million.
With the CIA's abrupt departure from the region last week, following the advance of Iraqi forces into Irbil, headquarters of the CIA-run organization, the huge sums of money appear to have had meagre returns.
Two years ago the CIA installed a team of intelligence officers in four rented Kurd houses overlooking Irbil. The CIA filled them with millions of dollars of top-secret communications systems and other sensitive covert CIA equipment. Apparenttly, all or most of this expenditure of tax money for CIA spying activities was lost when Saddam Hussein learned of the Clinton CIA operation and surprised those in the house and executed them.
The question of president Clinton's military adventures in Iraq this past week raises policy issues which should be openly addressed. For example, U.S. involvement in the security of the Persian Gulf region has escalated dramatically since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of some $40 billion per year. There exists a shadowy network of formal and informal bilateral agreeements making the southern Pesian gulf states a military protectorate.
This is a risky undertaking for the White House and may ultimately prove to be a policy the American people cannot affford. The U.S. military presence in the gulf is ostensibly intended to protect non-democratic Arab monarchies from incursions by their neighbors, Iran and Iraq.
The southern Persian gulf monarchies, with all of their wealth, cannot sustain the economic cost of thier own state welfare programs. Economic collapse is the inevitable fall-out in these Arab emirates where corrupt and arrogant rulers have used state welfare programs to placate grumblimg subjects denied personal freedom and elections.
Consequently, the Persian gulf monarchs face increasingly volitile internal security threats and growing anti-American sentiment. For example, the Kobar Towers bombing of the U.S. military installation in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, has been traced to an internal Saudi terrorist group.
The United States does not have sufficient economic or political interests to justify the risks and economic costs of attempting to manage Persian Gulf security for the Arab emirates.
The Clinton White House should explain its actions to Congress and be required to state a coherent foreign policy rationale for U.S. involvement in the Kuwait and Iraq. Failing that, the Congress should cut-off further Persian Gulf spending by the White House, and get American military forces out of the Gulf. The Arab emirates should take responsibility for their own Persian gulf security.
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