WASHINGTON -- By the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, it had become America's longest war, shadowed the legacies of four presidents, killed 58,000 Americans along with many thousands more Vietnamese, and cost the U.S. more than $660 billion in today's dollars.
By the time the bill for World War II passed the $600 billion mark, in mid-1943, the United States had driven German forces out of North Africa, devastated the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway and launched the vast offensives that would liberate Europe and the South Pacific.
The Iraq war is far smaller and narrower than those conflicts, and it has not extended beyond the tenure of a single president. But its cost is beginning to reach historic proportions, and the budgetary "burn rate" for Iraq might be greater than in some periods in past wars.
If U.S. involvement continues on the current scale, the cost of the war on terrorism -- including the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and on other foreign fronts -- is projected to surpass this country's Vietnam spending sometime next year.
And the accumulating cost is adding to resistance to President Bush's war policy in Congress as well as in public opinion, even though concern about the cost in human lives, the war's effect on America's place in the world and other such factors loom larger.
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Last week, when Bush unveiled his new war plan -- which included sending an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq and launching another effort to provide jobs and public services in Baghdad -- the cost issue was raised by Republicans as well as Democrats.
But it had been simmering for more than a year.
Members of Congress have talked relatively little about the war's increasing price because of the human costs, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said. "But certainly we're cognizant of it," she said. "When you say for what we're spending in a month in Iraq, you could fully fund and double the science budgets of the United States and come up with a viable alternative to oil, it puts it in perspective."
Even so, loyal Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who was chairman of the budget committee until the Democrats took control of the Senate this year, criticized the administration's approach to war costs, calling it "without any discipline as to how much is going to be spent."
"They're gaming the system," Gregg said.
Some Republicans, especially fiscal conservatives, are particularly unhappy because, they say, the president and the Defense Department have refused to address the war's influence on the budget in a straightforward way.
Instead of including war costs in the regular budget, such as the one Bush will send to Congress next month, the administration has been asking Congress for emergency-spending bills that short-circuit many of the usual review procedures for appropriating money.
"Muting and undermining the legitimacy of the congressional role in funding is, I think, undermining to some degree the commitment to the war effort itself," Gregg said.
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The administration says its approach is necessary because it is unable to determine what it will need for the war in the coming fiscal year, which begins each October. Critics say that might have been true early in the war but that by now most costs are predictable far in advance.
Last year, Congress approved a provision in the annual defense authorization bill calling on the administration to change course and put its request for war money in regular spending bills subject to full congressional review.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., proposed that Congress block Bush's new plan by withholding money. To date, Congress has not used its power of the purse to limit Bush's prosecution of the war, partly because it doesn't want to seem to deny American troops any support they need.
From the beginning of President Johnson's troop buildup in 1965 to the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1975, the United States spent the equivalent of $662 billion in 2007 dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The war in Iraq is harder to measure because its costs tend to be mixed up with those of the war in Afghanistan and Bush's broader global war on terrorism, says Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C.
Starting with the anti-terrorism appropriation enacted a week after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Kosiak figures the United States has spent $400 billion fighting terrorism through fiscal 2006, which ended Sept. 30.
For fiscal 2007, Congress so far has approved $70 billion. The president is expected to ask Congress for $100 billion more.
Even if the fighting stops soon, which few people expect, the bills would accumulate as the Pentagon pushed to restore what the war had cost in troops and material.
