The strain on the US armed forces on account of the war fought in Afghanistan and Iraq is visible. With Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates requesting for another $42.3 billion to keep the military pressure up in Iraq and Afghanistan, the funding request by the Bush administration for the year 2008 has touched the all time high of $190 billion for any war year. The total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan war would now be around $800 billion ever since the war on terror began right after September 11, 2001.
The request came in the wake of Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., making it clear to the Senate that the army was spread dangerously thin and could find it very difficult to respond to other urgent exigencies, if the need arose. Casey, in an unusual move, had requested to appear before the Senate to apprise it of the problems being faced by the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
President Bush has already declared a limited drawdown beginning in December this year. The request for additional funding has also come at a time when in a rare bipartisan consensus the Senate approved the proposal of dividing Iraq into three separate and autonomous regions for shias, sunnis and the kurds. The scheme is quite well defined in the Constitution of Iraq itself, but the Senate wants the process to be hastened through diplomatic means. The Senate seemed unhappy with the war funding requests which, in its opinion, was ‘habit forming’. The Senate also made it clear that it was not willing to mechanically ‘rubber stamp’ all funding requests that the President would send in.
