Linda Bilmes

And Larry Lindsay, who was the Republican economic advisor at the time, started saying, you know, this could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

This could cost like 1% of GDP.

And he was fired for even having that thought and expressing it.

So there was a very deliberate effort to not discuss the cost of the war because that was going to interfere with the rush into war.

And then one of the major issues

that I saw at the beginning of the Iraq war was that we were paying for the war through emergency appropriations.

Now, emergency appropriations are there for a reason.

So, for example, if there's a hurricane or an earthquake, the objective is to get money out to people who need it very quickly.

But 10 years into the Iraq War, we were still paying for trillions of dollars of spending as an emergency, even though we had 400 bases.

in Iraq that we had built, and we had hundreds of thousands of troops who were there.

So we were still pretending that this was like some very, very short-term emergency thing where we didn't really need to worry about the details.

And that meant that we were significantly underestimating the costs.

Yeah, and it was very convenient for the administration and for Congress to fund these wars through emergency spending, because that way they didn't have to put it into the budget for the following year.

So they could every single year minimize the projection of what the deficit would be.

So they could say, oh, the deficit's going down, the deficit's going down, because they weren't accounting for the fact that we were going to be spending another $150 billion or whatever in emergency spending on the war, even though

There was no way we could not be spending that, but it made it look as if

The deficit would be lower.

And it also made it seem as if the end of the war could be right around the corner.

And for quite a few years early into the Iraq War, if you look at the statements of senior officials, they were continually saying that the war was about to end, that we were about to turn a corner, the worst was behind us, and so on.

And that kind of made it seem as if that could be real because we weren't budgeting for it for the following year.