What price freedom? That question, updated to suit the tight-fisted realities of modern American politics, is being raised anew in Washington this week. The new version is, “How much do we have to spend to get rid of Saddam Hussein?” The answer, it seems, is more - ever more.
Operation Desert Spin is in full cry as the Clinton administration attempts to portray the weekend’s events as a great defeat for Saddam Hussein, even as his unfortunate citizens read in their newspapers that the great leader has once again “pulled the rug out from under America’s feet.” Pundits debate America’s credibility. Military analysts wonder about the effects on morale. The President’s critics lambaste his lack of nerve.
Meanwhile, the American taxpayer is asking a far less complicated question: How much am I spending to send the cream of the U.S. military on their biannual retreat to the Persian Gulf?
THE MONEY PIT
Accounting in an atmosphere of unaccountability is an imprecise science at best. But, according to administration and independent military analysts, here’s a rough breakdown of the production costs for 1998’s epic, “Showdown with Saddam II - Return to the Gulf.”
Throw in U.S. contributions to the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and a proposed $97 million to fund Iraqi opposition groups in 1999, and you’re looking at close to $1.7 billion. That amount is likely to increase if the United States is true to its pledge to maintain at least some of the forces recently dispatched to the Gulf for the next few weeks.
An official of the General Accounting Office told me that once deployed, these extra forces accrue infrastructure, communications and other charges at a rate of about $100 million a week.
Of course, that is still a small number in an annual military budget of about $270 billion. Still, it is not insignificant. Nor does it include the $7.4 billion spent by the United States during the 1990-91 Gulf War (where most of the costs were borne by Gulf Arab states, Japan and Germany). Add that to the tally, along with smaller flare-ups since 1991, and a total cost of $10 billion is enough to raise eyebrows even in the jaded halls of the Pentagon.
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SURPRISINGLY LITTLE CONTROVERSY
Perhaps only in Washington could the expenditure of $10 billion on an enterprise that appears to have no end go so unremarked. And in the gargantuan realm of American tax policy, $10 billion isn’t much over eight years. It works out to something less than $1 per tax payer.
But is it a dollar well spent? Surprisingly, that’s not a subject being debated. To be sure, there is plenty of debate over the Clinton Administration’s policies toward Iraq. Hawks lament the fact that Bush didn’t finish the job in 1991 and feel Clinton should now go for the military version of the Full Monty. Doves complain that the foundation of the policy - the idea that economic sanctions would either bring Iraqi compliance or Saddam’s downfall - has been disproved and must be abandoned.
But where is Ralph Nader? Where is the CATO Institute? Where is Jesse Helms? Where, by God, are Steve Forbes and Ross Perot? If Perot can’t hear a giant sucking sound in the Persian Gulf, could he hear it anywhere?
It’s not as if foreign policy is immune to the scrutiny of budget cutters. Foreign aid spending - Jesse Helm’s infamous “foreign rat holes” - are the 1990s versions of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens”
Nor is military spending immune. The House and Senate Republicans heap scorn on Clinton’s refusal to spend money on ballistic missile defense or “readiness.” They are similarly quick to slam the administration for the $1.9 billion it spent successfully keeping the peace in Bosnia over the past year. But the $1.5 billion disbursed to maintain the unsatisfactory status quo of the Persian Gulf gets barely a mention.
NEW DIRECTION
In fact, the only Iraq-related activity afoot in the U.S. Congress right now would spend more money, not less, to battle the evil Saddam. A bill approved by the Senate last month authorized $97 million in fiscal 1999 for the overthrow of the Iraqi regime. Included in that figure are $3 million for an international tribunal to settle war crimes committed by the Iraqis; $20 million in humanitarian relief for areas outside of government control - primarily the Kurdish region in the north; and $5 million for anti-Hussein broadcasts into Iraq.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) last week called the legislation “a major step forward in the final conclusion of the Persian Gulf War.” He compared the bill to those that funded Cold War insurgencies against the Nicaraguan and Angolan governments and communist insurgencies around the world. President Clinton, initially skeptical of the bill, is reportedly reconsidering after the most recent brush with Saddam.
The experts, however, are skeptical. After the last inconclusive Gulf buildup ended in February, Former CIA Director John Deutch warned in The New York Times that such covert action is unlikely to be successful.
“The problem is that policy makers frequently adopt covert action to avoid harder choices,” wrote Deutch, “either direct military action or the difficult aboveboard diplomatic work necessary to replace a foreign leader.”
Deutch should know. In 1996, on his watch at the spy agency, the CIA launched an effort to engineer a coup against Saddam that ended with a massacre of its Iraqi assets and ultimately an Iraqi invasion of northern Kurdish regions to mop up insurgents. The United States, humbled, evacuated hundreds of anti-Saddam Iraqis and their families as a result.
If the United States chooses to move away from military pressure and toward covert action, its decision could be rationalized as a budget-cutting measure. After all, if the United States had limited its anti-Saddam spending to $100 million a year since 1991, we’d be looking at a “surplus” of about $600 million. Who knows - the covert action might even have worked.
Of course, we could also be looking at an Iraq armed with nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.
What does all this mean for the American taxpayer? It the simplest of terms, the choice being offered by the two dominant tendencies of American politics are as follows:
A. Spend $100 million a year in an effort to overthrow Saddam with no guarantee of success.
B. Spend money as needed (at a rate considerably higher than $100 million a year) to “contain” Iraq.
C. Do both.
Choose your best option and e-mail it to your member of Congress.
Michael Moran is MSNBC’s International Editor