WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has begun telling the White House and Congress that defeating Iraq and occupying the country for six months could cost as much as $85 billion, according to sources -- considerably more than what senior administration officials have been saying in public.
Combined with aid for regional allies such as Turkey, the price tag for the conflict could top the $100-billion mark, twice the war costs cited just last month by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and an amount that the White House dismissed as outlandish last fall.
And the tally could rise further. Indeed, some close to the process say war planners have no firm grip on the conflict's final costs, a fact that is causing consternation among administration policymakers as the nation edges closer to war.
"It's like watching numbers roll higher and higher on a slot machine," said one State Department official, who asked not to be named.
This official said that during recent interagency meetings, White House budget aides "put their hands over their ears and said, " 'We're not listening.' "
"We can't take any more requests. Get a grip on this process and figure out exactly what you're planning," the official remembered the aides as saying. "They basically said, 'Get ahold of yourselves.' "
An Office of Management and Budget spokesman refused to comment on this account Tuesday and said that the administration has yet to settle on how much it will ask Congress to provide in order to pay for the war. President Bush's budgets for this fiscal year and next included no money for a war with Iraq.
"The president has not yet been presented with any numbers" for war costs, said OMB communications director Trent Duffy. The costs are "all subject to decisions the president has yet to make," said Duffy, "so it's premature to speculate what they might be."
Bush suggested Tuesday that war costs must come second to national security.
"There are all kinds of estimates about the cost of war," the president told reporters after a session with his new economic advisors. "But the risk of doing nothing, the risk of the security of this country being jeopardized at the hands of a madman with weapons of mass destruction, far exceeds the risks of any action."
Sources said that Bush met with Rumsfeld and OMB Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. on Tuesday to discuss war costs and the price of a U.S. occupation of Iraq that officials expect would follow.
