War is big business.
The Pentagon recently estimated that military operations in Iraq were costing an average of $7.5 million a day between June and last week — an annual rate of about $2.7 billion. But even if costs ballooned to, say, $15 billion a year, the figure would still be dwarfed by the approximately $1.3 billion a week we’re still spending in Afghanistan.
And for now, there’s no cash flow problem: Obama can just dip into the “Overseas Contingency Operations” budget, the $85 billion ”all-purpose war funding credit card” Congress just gave him – $26 billion more than he had even asked for.