IRAQ - Why Sunnis Want The US To Stay.

Gunmen on Nov. 24 attacked a Sunni enclave in a mostly Shi'ite district of Baghdad, burning four Sunni mosques and homes, despite a curfew imposed on the Iraqi capital for most of the day. In the northern city of Tal A'far a pair of bombs outside a car dealership killed 22 people. The incidents were a sign of hardening sectarian hatred in the wake of a Nov. 23 multiple bombings which, by some estimates, were the deadliest series of Neo-Salafi attacks in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion.

The death toll from the Nov. 23 car suicide bombs and mortar strikes against markets and squares in the north-east Baghdad slum of Sadr City - the support base for the radical Shi'ite movement led by the anti-US mullah Muqtada al-Sadr - is reported to exceed 200. The attacks coincided with an assault by dozens of gunmen against the health ministry, controlled by a Sadrist minister and allegedly used by Shi'ite militiamen associated with the movement as a base for assassinations and abductions.

In a Friday sermon, Sadr on Nov. 24 challenged Hareth al-Dhari, the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), Iraq's most influential Sunni institution, to issue fatwas (religious decrees) condemning the attacks on Shi'ites and forbidding his followers from joining Neo-Salafi organisations such as al-Qaeda which target Shi'ite civilians. He said: Dhari must "issue a fatwa prohibiting the killing of Shi'ites so as to preserve Muslim blood and must prohibit membership of al-Qaeda or any other [Neo-Salafi] organisation that has made [the Shi'ites] their enemies". If the senior Sunni cleric did so, Sadr would support the revocation of the arrest warrant against Dhari.

Dhari, currently outside Iraq after the government issued a warrant against him for incitement to violence, has said that al-Qaeda practises legitimate "resistance". Politicians from the Sadrist movement threatened to pull out of the government if PM Nouri al-Maliki were to go through with a meeting with President Bush scheduled for Nov. 29-30 in Amman, Jordan.

The Sadrists, as well as Tehran, accuse Washington of putting pressure on Maliki's government to disarm Shi'ite militias, which they say inhibits their ability to defend themselves against Sunni extremists. The boycott threats may be an attempt to deflect Shi'ite anger away from the Sunnis and towards the Americans, an Iran-inspired strategy which has been surprisingly effective since the 2003 invasion in limiting reprisals for attacks such as the Nov. 23 blasts. The attacks appeared to have heightened internal tensions within the Sadrist movement, whose leadership has consistently called for Iraqi unity against the US occupation but whose rank and file are blamed for a significant proportion, if not the majority, of the thousands of sectarian killings that have taken place since the Feb. 22 Neo-Salafi bombing of a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra', north of Baghdad.

Sadr issued a statement immediately after the Nov. 23 attack calling for restraint and ordering his followers not to carry out any action without consulting the Shi'ite clerical hierarchy. But a significant proportion of his followers believe that their only safety lies in militias such as Jaysh al-Mahdi taking the fight to the Neo-Salafi Wahhabis, or anti-Shi'ite puritans, a category into which an increasing number of Sunnis appear to be lumped. Most Sunnis fear the Shi'ite militias and urge the US military to stay in Iraq to prevent their being wiped out in a civil war.

The cost of combat in Iraq has now surpassed $300 bn, according to US government estimates. Add in activities in Afghanistan, and the total price of the global war on terror is about $500 bn, making it one of the most monetarily costly conflicts in which the US has ever engaged. Now the Pentagon is in the process of drawing up its follow-on request for the remainder of FY 2007. Reports indicate that the Pentagon could ask for $120 bn to $160 bn, which would be its largest funding request yet for the global war on terror. After they take control of Congress next year, Democrats will almost certainly investigate both the rate of Iraq spending and the manner in which it has been appropriated.

Much of the war has been funded through supplementals, so-called emergency bills whose use in this case has become increasingly controversial in Congress. Gordon Adams, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center who was the senior White House official for national security budgets under President Clinton, was on Nov. 21 quoted as saying: "We're now at $507 bn for the global war on terror and counting, and almost all of that has been pushed through a process that doesn't give proper scrutiny to the budget. Are we spending it wisely?". (Last month, Congress approved $70 bn in spending intended to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through the first six months of fiscal 2007, which began on Oct. 1 for the US government. The size of the request under discussion reflects both the continued nature of the mission and past wear-and-tear. Both the Army and the Air Force need billions to replace expensive hardware worn out by the pace of warfare in Iraq).

Before the invasion of Iraq, the White House estimated that combat operations there would cost about $50 bn. That forecast, however, was based on a quick end to the war and a rapid drawdown of US troops. Three years later, Iraq alone is costing the US some $8 bn a month. Estimates of total spending vary, due to the fact that the Pentagon records on obligations do not provide comprehensive specifics, and the supplemental bills voted by Congress do not have the line-item details of regular sending bills.

Congressional Research Service (CRS) figures puts the cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war-on-terror activities at $507 bn. Of that, the Afghan campaign has cost $88 bn, according to CRS. Iraq accounts for the bulk of the rest. The drain of continued fighting in Iraq has meant that the global war on terror has steadily moved up the list of the most costly conflicts in US history (in terms of money, not casualties). In 2005, it passed the Korean war's inflation-adjusted cost of $361 bn. Next year it will almost certainly pass the Vietnam War's $531 bn, making it the second most expensive US war ever, behind World War II.

Given the uncertainty of troop levels, it is very difficult to estimate the US military's future costs in Iraq. Overall, each individual soldier deployed in Iraq for a year costs about $275,000, according to CRS. The cost rises to $360,000 if required additional investments in equipment and facilities are added. Using a scenario in which US troop levels fall to 73,000 by 2010, and then stay at that level, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cumulative cost of the global war on terror could reach $808 bn by 2016.

The Pentagon and the Bush administration have continued the practice by which funding for the war on terror is requested in the form of supplemental appropriations. Supplementals are prepared much closer to the time when the money will actually be spent. The Vietnam War, for instance, was funded via supplementals at its outset. Later, Vietnam costs were folded into the regular budget process.

Supplementals provide much less detail as to where money will be spent than do regular budget documents, and receive less congressional oversight than do regular budget bills. So far, the White House has shown little inclination to fund Iraq and Afghanistan via the regular budget, despite some pressure from Congress to do so. In addition, the nature of items paid for via these war spending bills may have begun to expand, to include items related to peacetime missions as well.

A Democratic-controlled Congress will almost certainly look for ways to increase pressure on the White House to abandon the flexibility and opaqueness of the emergency bill approach.