The Iran War Costs As Much As Afghanistan During The Surge

The Pentagon's acting comptroller tells Congress the war has cost $25 billion thus far. What would you have liked to spend that money on instead of killing schoolgirls? 

Edited by Sam Thielman

DURING THIS MORNING'S House Armed Services Committee's budget hearing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hit his customary line about how it's irresponsible to compare the Iran War with the Forever Wars of his youth. "My generation understands how long we were in Iraq, how long we were in Afghanistan, how long we were in Vietnam. We're two months in… an existential fight," Hegseth scoffed, as if the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam Wars were not also doomed wars by the time their second months had expired. (In fairness to Hegseth, in retrospect, it might have taken Afghanistan three months to be doomed.)

Before I go on, there is nothing "existential" about this war. That's an indefensible, propagandistic claim—Iran's missiles can't reach the United States and it doesn't have a nuclear weapon; North Korea has nukes and ICBMs and yet still we carry on—and I don't want to let that pass unchallenged. 

Anyway, Hegseth probably shouldn’t have invoked the forever wars he soldiered in. Because his acting comptroller, Jules W. Hurst III, gave an estimate for the cost of the Iran War that's comparable to what the United States spent during the 2010-11 Afghanistan surge.

In the first estimate the Pentagon has offered for the cost of the Iran War, Hurst pegged it at $25 billion. While there isn't an available cost breakdown to inspect, I suspect Hurst is lowballing it, tallying predictable costs like missile expenditure and not, say, what it will cost the Navy to retrofit the three much-deployed aircraft carrier strike groups, or the needed repairs on the U.S.' Gulf and Iraq military bases that Iranian missiles have pummelled. Combat pay is also certainly an additional and unknown cost right now. Beyond those off-the-top-of-my-head reactions, this is a generally dishonest administration, and it's currently asking Congress for a $1.5 trillion budget, a 50 percent budget increase for a lavishly funded war machine that can't pass an audit. It has no shortage of incentives to downplay the costs of an unpopular war.

But let's not overlook that $25 billion in two months is just a massive cost for an elective war that is driving up oil and commodities prices worldwide. The Afghanistan surge was about $10 billion per month. With inflation, that's about $15 billion per month in today’s dollars. Even taking the Pentagon at its fiscal word, this war is in the fiscal ballpark of one of the hallmark military failures of our era. Since this is not an infantryman's war but instead an airman’s and sailors' war, it was always going to cost an absurd amount of money. The costs will not only be paid in the direct military expenditures, but in how expensive everything else is going to become because of the interruption to one of the world's most important energy and commercial waterways. That was not a consequence of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The unignorable reality is that the war has devolved into a fiasco. The Trump administration cannot meet its (shifting) war aims, which have been overtaken by the calamity of the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz, something the U.S. counter-blockade is unlikely to open. (That counter-blockade will also run up the costs of the war because of the naval assets necessary.) Hegseth and Caine offered no plausible theory to break this deadlock of their own making. "You have to stare down this kind of enemy, get them to a point where they're at the table, ready to give [their nuclear program] up," Hegseth said. The Iranians had been at the table! Now a harder-line leadership has replaced the one the U.S. and Israel killed. For all his umbrage about a comparison to the Afghanistan War, Hegseth's theory of victory is the same one offered there: Continue military pressure until enemy leadership can take no more and must negotiate. It failed there against a far less potent adversary than the Iranians.

Hegseth proceeded to echo another perennial from Iraq and Afghanistan: questioning the loyalty of those who question the wars and their architects. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) called the war a quagmire. Hegseth sputtered with practiced umbrage. "I hope you appreciate how reckless it is… the way you stain the troops when you say, two months in [it's a quagmire], shame on you," he said. Garamendi was "handing propaganda to our enemies. Don't say 'I support the troops' and then say, two months in, a quagmire. … Who do you cheer for? It undermines the mission." 

Hegseth seems to want to resolve the contradiction between the administration's antiwar rhetoric and relentless-war reality by simply scandalizing the comparison of this war to earlier lost ones. I don't know if Hegseth remembers Donald Rumsfeld, but he's offering a more histrionic version of how Rumsfeld reacted to his own emerging quagmires. Rumsfeld once denied that a guerrilla war was taking place in Iraq! He persisted even after reporter in a briefing once read him the Pentagon's own definition of guerrilla war. Rumsfeld was doing the propaganda work the war required. Hegseth will do no less. His pugilism toward congressional opposition is crasser than Rumsfeld's, but that's a stylistic and generational difference. Their messages are the same: you must proclaim the disaster to be a victory or reveal yourself to be morally derelict. 

Also, Hurst said the Pentagon will at some point send Congress a "supplemental" bill to finance the war. That was exactly how the Bush and Obama administrations made their defense budgets look smaller than they really were: by separating out the operational costs of the war from the defense budget and effectively creating two defense budgets. But don't compare this war to those! 

Finally, basic humanity compels me to say that the true horror of war will always be measured in human lives, not in financial costs. I highlight the financial costs to invite comparisons to what the United States could have financed instead of an unjustifiable war of aggression, one where it shows no aptitude to prevail, and one that began by killing as many as 165 children at school. 

On May 1, Trump will have surpassed the 60-day contingency window for the 1973 War Powers Act. I don't expect Congress will force any consequences for this, but it will make ongoing Iran operations illegal, since Congress has not authorized any. What will Congress do, besides showcasing its irrelevance over life-and-death aspects of the Constitutional order? 

A BOOK I STRONGLY RECOMMEND: The distinguished foreign correspondent Suzy Hansen this week released a clinic in writing contemporary history through journalism, titled From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul and A Neighborhood in The Age of Erdogan. I can't say enough about it. Hansen skillfully weaves more than 100 years of late-Ottoman-to-Republican-era history into a narrative that contextualizes the cleavages in Turkish society and the various ways Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressed them to remold the country in his image. This is the sort of book that made me attentive to how little I actually understood Turkey and Erdogan. The best sort of books have that effect on a reader. Without being overwrought, Hansen very skillfully invites comparisons with America in the era of Trump that land forebodingly. Her craftwork is no less impressive: her story begins with Erdogan's early construction patronage, and the place her book ends makes it an inspired choice. Don't miss this book.

TWO PUBLIC APPEARANCES OF MINE are coming up! On May 14, come to the Brooklyn Institute for a discussion I'll be part of about the Jewish anti-Zionist past and future, hinging on Molly Crabapple's bestselling (!!!) book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of The Jewish Bund. Tickets are available here. I hear it's sold out, though. 

Then, on June 30, I'll be speaking with my brother from another mother, Colin Asher, about his hopefully-bestselling book The Midnight Special, the best book about American music and the carceral state you'll ever read. It's going to be the first time Colin and I have been onstage since our teenage punk band 30 years ago. RSVP here. Hope to see you at both! 

OK, there's a third public appearance that I'm… not totally sure I should discuss, but if you come by this Sunday, May 3, to the embattled Bushwick City Farm, where there will be both a block party and a 2 pm press conference by residents attempting to save this sliver of green space, you will see me in a probably unexpected context. That's right by Broadway and Myrtle.