Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Saturday Night
How Much Will War With Iraq Cost?
Aired February 22, 2003 - 22:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: There are a lot of unknowns about what will happen if the U.S. does in fact go to war in Iraq. What we do know, it will not be cheap. Some experts expect it to cost as much as $60 billion. And that is just how much the actual war might cost. It's even harder to tell how much it would cost to occupy and rebuild Iraq afterward. And there are a lot of other expenses.
CNN military analyst and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark joins us to talk more about the money. He is in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Thanks very much for joining us, general.
WESLEY CLARK, FMR. NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: Good to be with you, Anderson.
COOPER: As you look at this thing in total, how much do you estimate it's going to cost?
CLARK: Between $100 and $200 billion, depending on how long we stay there and what the other effects are on other countries in the region, like Egypt and Israel and Jordan, but we're also going to have to subsidize.
COOPER: So that money is not just money of the cost of the ground war. You're talking occupation afterwards?
CLARK: That's right.
COOPER: And -- I mean, what's the breakdown? Where do you get that figure?
CLARK: It's a ballpark figure. We're paying say $3 billion a year to the Egyptian economy. They need more. We're $3 to $5 billion to the Israelis. They've asked for three times that. The Turkish figure we've got is $6 billion this year, maybe $20 billion in loan guarantees and other things. That's the start of this. And then, there's the reconstruction problem in Iraq.
COOPER: In..
CLARK: Example...
COOPER: Sorry.
CLARK: ...we paid $200 million to Turkey to take command of the mission in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan mission's not over. We've got our own 10,000 there. We're supporting other nations during the peacekeeping there. So this is going to roll on and on and on.
COOPER: You have no doubt heard this from a lot of people, but you know, there are a lot of people who hear these kind of numbers and say, what are we paying these guys for? I mean, they're supposed to be our allies. Why do we need to be paying Saudi Arabia money? What's the answer?
CLARK: Well, I don't think -- as far as I know, we're not paying anything to Saudi Arabia, for example, right now. In fact, they're still buying weapons. They are having economic difficulties, but they do have oil. But the other countries in the region are in one way or another in financial trouble, and have been for a long time. They've been sustained on a diet of expectations of economic growth, funded by taking short and long term loans that come from commercial banks, sometimes guaranteed by governments.
And then they have to repay these loans. And repaying these loans consumes their foreign exchange earnings from their exports and from remitted earnings to their workers to send the money back home. And they can't get themselves out of the hole easily.
COOPER: Do you have any sense of how much we will be spending on munitions alone? I mean, obviously, you know, precision guided weaponry does not come cheap. The percentage of precision guided weapons, that I understand we would be using in any potential war, far greater than it was during the first Gulf War. How expensive is an air war?
CLARK: It really will depend on the character of the war, Anderson. But just a ballpark figure, maybe a couple of billion dollars. The joint direct attack munitions, the JDAM that run on the global positioning system that fallen in the specific coordinate on the ground, are relatively inexpensive. Maybe $15,000 a kit. The imaging infrared missiles that are launched to fly underneath the clouds with a range of 30 miles or so, they're more like in some cases a half million, $1 million, or a $1.5 million. So they're much more expensive. And it depends, really, on the mix of the ordinance that we use.
COOPER: I'm interested to hear from you. I mean, you've been in those command and control centers. I mean, does -- do the dollars come into play when you're making decisions, I mean when you're in -- whether it's in the heat of battle or in the planning stage? I mean, do you think about the dollars? Or is that, you know, just sort of one of those things that's just got to be done?
CLARK: They -- we really can't. Not only can we not think about the dollars, we don't really have any idea. In the military, we really never know how much it's going to cost. And all the figures I've given you are just ballpark figures, because it's really up to the government and the accountants and how they weight the costs, and what they consider the specific costs of that operation.
For example, a unit at Fort Hood, Texas, is getting ready to go to war. It suddenly discovers it needs more uniforms and its equipment is not quite as ready. It orders a whole burst of repair parts. It's been doing this for months in advance. Is that normal operations and maintenance expense? Or is that attributable directly to the impending conflict?
And they'll be thousands of decisions like that, that'll have to be made, that'll affect with the total of the war is. When we're in the operation, we only want one thing. And this is the way I believe it should be. You want your armed forces to win. You want them to win as decisively as possible, with the least cost in human lives, both the enemy civilians, the enemy to civilians and our own as possible. If that means you're going to use weapons that cost 20 times or 40 times as much as the inexpensive weapons, you know, it doesn't matter to us. In fact, we just want the best weapon.
COOPER: Understandable. General Wesley Clark, appreciate you joining us. Thank you.
CLARK: Thank you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired February 22, 2003 - 22:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: There are a lot of unknowns about what will happen if the U.S. does in fact go to war in Iraq. What we do know, it will not be cheap. Some experts expect it to cost as much as $60 billion. And that is just how much the actual war might cost. It's even harder to tell how much it would cost to occupy and rebuild Iraq afterward. And there are a lot of other expenses.
CNN military analyst and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark joins us to talk more about the money. He is in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Thanks very much for joining us, general.
WESLEY CLARK, FMR. NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: Good to be with you, Anderson.
COOPER: As you look at this thing in total, how much do you estimate it's going to cost?
CLARK: Between $100 and $200 billion, depending on how long we stay there and what the other effects are on other countries in the region, like Egypt and Israel and Jordan, but we're also going to have to subsidize.
COOPER: So that money is not just money of the cost of the ground war. You're talking occupation afterwards?
CLARK: That's right.
COOPER: And -- I mean, what's the breakdown? Where do you get that figure?
CLARK: It's a ballpark figure. We're paying say $3 billion a year to the Egyptian economy. They need more. We're $3 to $5 billion to the Israelis. They've asked for three times that. The Turkish figure we've got is $6 billion this year, maybe $20 billion in loan guarantees and other things. That's the start of this. And then, there's the reconstruction problem in Iraq.
COOPER: In..
CLARK: Example...
COOPER: Sorry.
CLARK: ...we paid $200 million to Turkey to take command of the mission in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan mission's not over. We've got our own 10,000 there. We're supporting other nations during the peacekeeping there. So this is going to roll on and on and on.
COOPER: You have no doubt heard this from a lot of people, but you know, there are a lot of people who hear these kind of numbers and say, what are we paying these guys for? I mean, they're supposed to be our allies. Why do we need to be paying Saudi Arabia money? What's the answer?
CLARK: Well, I don't think -- as far as I know, we're not paying anything to Saudi Arabia, for example, right now. In fact, they're still buying weapons. They are having economic difficulties, but they do have oil. But the other countries in the region are in one way or another in financial trouble, and have been for a long time. They've been sustained on a diet of expectations of economic growth, funded by taking short and long term loans that come from commercial banks, sometimes guaranteed by governments.
And then they have to repay these loans. And repaying these loans consumes their foreign exchange earnings from their exports and from remitted earnings to their workers to send the money back home. And they can't get themselves out of the hole easily.
COOPER: Do you have any sense of how much we will be spending on munitions alone? I mean, obviously, you know, precision guided weaponry does not come cheap. The percentage of precision guided weapons, that I understand we would be using in any potential war, far greater than it was during the first Gulf War. How expensive is an air war?
CLARK: It really will depend on the character of the war, Anderson. But just a ballpark figure, maybe a couple of billion dollars. The joint direct attack munitions, the JDAM that run on the global positioning system that fallen in the specific coordinate on the ground, are relatively inexpensive. Maybe $15,000 a kit. The imaging infrared missiles that are launched to fly underneath the clouds with a range of 30 miles or so, they're more like in some cases a half million, $1 million, or a $1.5 million. So they're much more expensive. And it depends, really, on the mix of the ordinance that we use.
COOPER: I'm interested to hear from you. I mean, you've been in those command and control centers. I mean, does -- do the dollars come into play when you're making decisions, I mean when you're in -- whether it's in the heat of battle or in the planning stage? I mean, do you think about the dollars? Or is that, you know, just sort of one of those things that's just got to be done?
CLARK: They -- we really can't. Not only can we not think about the dollars, we don't really have any idea. In the military, we really never know how much it's going to cost. And all the figures I've given you are just ballpark figures, because it's really up to the government and the accountants and how they weight the costs, and what they consider the specific costs of that operation.
For example, a unit at Fort Hood, Texas, is getting ready to go to war. It suddenly discovers it needs more uniforms and its equipment is not quite as ready. It orders a whole burst of repair parts. It's been doing this for months in advance. Is that normal operations and maintenance expense? Or is that attributable directly to the impending conflict?
And they'll be thousands of decisions like that, that'll have to be made, that'll affect with the total of the war is. When we're in the operation, we only want one thing. And this is the way I believe it should be. You want your armed forces to win. You want them to win as decisively as possible, with the least cost in human lives, both the enemy civilians, the enemy to civilians and our own as possible. If that means you're going to use weapons that cost 20 times or 40 times as much as the inexpensive weapons, you know, it doesn't matter to us. In fact, we just want the best weapon.
COOPER: Understandable. General Wesley Clark, appreciate you joining us. Thank you.
CLARK: Thank you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
