How Many Billions Will Bombing ISIS Cost? What About Other Radicals?

While the Obama administration splits hairs over
whether literally having armed American soldiers on Iraqi soil
counts as “troops
on the ground” (hint: It does) and quibbles about whether it’s
a good idea to arm so-called moderate rebels in Syria to fight ISIS
(hint:
The CIA says it’s not), the U.S.’s primary strategy in Iraq War
III has been airstrikes. How many billions of dollars is this going
to cost America, though?

It’s an important question posed by
Foreign Affairs, which calculates that “current estimates
put the yearly price tag for ISIS bombings at anywhere between $2.7
billion, if the current pace continues unchanged, and $10 billion,
if the United States escalates the air campaign and expands it into
Syria.” Obama has
suggested that fighting the Islamic state will take three
years. The U.S. began conducting air surveillance over Syria last
month, but so far has not dropped bombs.

Foreign Affairs contrasts this war with the
March-October 2011 bombing campaign in Libya, which “was shared
among several allies,” and cost about $1.1 billion. The global
price tag of bombing the Islamic State will rise since France just
initiated its own campaign
today.

The journal has put together some
impressive data on this war alongside comparisons to the U.S.’s
other air campaigns in countries like Yemen and Somalia, and notes
that “in the sheer number of strikes, the intensity of the U.S.
effort against ISIS has already exceeded both of these much
longer campaigns.” The U.S. has already conducted 174 strikes in
about a month’s time (two since
this Wednesday), compared to 350 in Pakistan, which we’ve been
bombing since 2008. 

Also notable is that in past campaigns, “airstrikes took a small
but significant toll on the civilian population.”

The three-year war plan makes a big assumption that things go
smoothly, which looks less and less likely as more volatile groups
emerge.

There are now over 50 Iran-backed Shiite Muslim militias
fighting ISIS, which is Sunni Muslim. Foreign Policy

notes that these “highly ideological, anti-American” groups
commit human rights violations that make them hardly better than
the Islamic State. They’re doing just as much as their enemy to
undermine the Baghdad government’s claim to authority, and they’re
throwing a huge wrench in “Obama’s stated
goal of working with an inclusive Iraqi government to push
back [ISIS].”

There’s a big can of worms, and the president can’t seem to
resist opening it.