WASHINGTON — By the time the Vietnam war ended in 1975, it had become America's longest war, shadowed the legacies of four presidents, killed 58,000 Americans along with many thousands more Vietnamese, and cost the U.S. more than $660 billion in today's dollars.
By the time the bill for World War II passed the $600-billion mark, in mid-1943, the United States had driven German forces out of North Africa, devastated the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway, and launched the vast offensives that would liberate Europe and the South Pacific.
The Iraq war is far smaller and narrower than those conflicts, and it has not extended beyond the tenure of a single president. But its price tag is beginning to reach historic proportions, and the budgetary "burn rate" for Iraq may be greater than in some periods in past wars.
If U.S. involvement continues on the current scale, the funding for the Iraq war -- combined with the conflict in Afghanistan and other foreign fronts in the war on terrorism -- is projected to surpass this country's Vietnam spending next year.
And the accumulating cost is adding to resistance to President Bush's war policy in Congress as well as in public opinion, even though concern about the cost in human lives, the war's impact on America's place in the world and other such factors loom larger.
Last week, when Bush unveiled his new war plan -- which included sending an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq and launching another effort to provide jobs and public services in Baghdad -- the cost issue was raised by Republicans as well as Democrats.
But it had been simmering for more than a year.
Members of Congress have talked relatively little about the war's accumulating price tag because of the human costs, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) said. "But certainly we're cognizant of it," she said. "When you say for what we're spending in a month in Iraq, you could fully fund and double the science budgets of the United States and come up with a viable alternative to oil, it puts it in perspective."
Even so loyal a Republican as Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who chaired the budget committee until the Democrats took control of the Senate this year, criticized the administration's approach to war costs, calling it "without any discipline as to how much is going to be spent."
"They're gaming the system," Gregg said.
