Unless there's a political tsunami, by the Fourth of July American troop strength in Iraq is going to be the highest it's ever been, according to Newsweek:
There will soon be more American soldiers in Iraq than at any point in the war so far. The incoming surge of 21,500 troops is only part of that picture; in addition, the U.S. commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has asked for an additional Army aviation brigade, as well as a couple thousand military police. Other support troops will be coming in to Iraq as well, and they weren't all included in the original 21,500 estimate announced by President Bush last month. When all this is complete, sometime in July, the grand total of U.S. troops in Iraq will be 173,000, U.S. military officials here confirmed on background, apparently because of the sensitivity of these details. And it's likely that U.S. troop numbers will stay at that level for months more, perhaps even into 2008. That's only part of the picture, however; the total number of U.S. troops deployed into the war theater, that is, Iraq and neighboring countries, may be as much as 100,000 more than that. ...
Some things are getting smaller. The projected size of the Coalition of the willing has reached a historic low, but by July the number of soldiers from U.S. allies in Iraq will actually climb a tad, to 13,000, thanks to a commitment from the former Soviet republic of Georgia for a new brigade of 2,300 troops. More than half of that 13,000 are British, who are also in the process of withdrawing more of their troops by next year, and the remainder are small contingents from 23 other contributing countries, major powers ranging from Mongolia to Peru.
And the cost:
So far, $351 billion has been spent or appropriated between 2003 and 2007, and the president's additional budget request of $68 billion in 2007 will bring that to $419 billion, if it passes, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (these figures include U.S. military expenditures, expenditures for Iraqi security forces, and spending for foreign aid and diplomatic operations in Iraq). With another $113 billion predicted for the 2008 budget, the total direct cost of the war will by then top half a trillion dollars, $532 billion in all. That naturally does not even begin to take into account indirect costs, from veterans' care to oil-price rises.
Newsweek takes the ultra-conservative approach regarding appropriations so far, as you can see here and here. But whatever the war spending actually is, veterans' care and the cost to society of PTSD and the like are never included in the official tally. Newsweek and the bean counters can call these "indirect" costs if they like, but you can count on them to have an immense economic impact after every war.
By the way, that extremely fluid $532 billion posited for what will have been slightly more than five years of war in Iraq compares with the inflation-adjusted $549 billion spent on war in Vietnam 1964-1975.
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