US President George W. Bush has formally requested a down-payment of nearly 75 billion dollars from the US Congress.
'The need is urgent. The wartime supplemental is directlyrelated to winning this war and to securing the peace that willfollow this war,' he said before a friendly Pentagon audience aftera classified briefing on the war.
The White House said 62.6 billion dollars would help pay for themassive troop deployment to the Gulf region, for fueling militarycrafts and for replacing the high-tech munitions being rained ontargets in Iraq.
There are more than 250,000 US troops and 45,000 British forcesin the Gulf, fighting alongside smaller numbers of Australian andPolish soldiers.
Another 4.24 billion will help shore up antiterrorism efforts inthe United States, roughly five billion will go to aid key USallies, and 2.4 billion will go toward humanitarian relief andreconstruction in Iraq.
With expenses mounting, aides said Bush hoped that lawmakerswould pass the emergency spending bill - which would only covercosts over the life of fiscal year 2003, ending September 30 - byApril 11.
A senior Bush aide earlier told reporters that the measureanticipates that the conflict, the stabilization of Iraq andwithdrawal of US forces will have begun in six months.
But Rumsfeld painted a bleaker picture of Operation IraqiFreedom. 'We can't say how long it will last,' he told reporters atthe Pentagon. 'We do not know. It is not knowable. I've said I don'tknow how many times. Days, weeks or months. Don't know.'
Rumsfeld made similar predictions about the cost of theoperation. 'The truth is, we don't know what the war is going tocost. You can't know it, it's not knowable,' he said.
Some US experts like Yale economist William Nordhaus estimatethe length and cost of the operation at 120 billion dollars for ashort war, and 1.6 trillion dollars for a 10 year rebuildingperiod.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, an independent group monitoring thenational budget, has estimated the cost of the war and of rebuildingIraq at more than 110 billion dollars this year, and more than 550billion the next 10 years.
Meanwhile Bush was to travel Wednesday to the headquarters ofthe US Central Command in Florida. The head of the Central Command,General Tommy Franks, is managing the Iraq war from a base inQatar.
Bush is then to travel to the Camp David retreat outsideWashington for talks late Wednesday and Thursday with British PrimeMinister Tony Blair, his closest ally in the war to disarm andtopple Saddam Hussein.
AFP