US Press
Senator Gallego rejects the Pentagon's new Iran war funding request
Image credit: Senator Ruben Gallego — US Senate Photographic Studio / Wikimedia Commons · License
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The argument in Washington has moved from whether the Iran war should have started to who keeps paying for it.
The Hill reported that Senator Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat, came out against the administration's request for $17 billion in additional military operating costs. "It's like giving a drunk more money and hoping that they'll stop drinking," he said on ABC's This Week.
Gallego told the programme that the president "planned nothing" before the war began. "We still don't quite understand why we went to Iran," he said, and "we don't know exactly how we're going to get out of Iran."
The request lands on top of the $200 billion supplemental the Pentagon asked Congress for in March, a demand Republicans have been arguing over since.
Why the number matters in Gaza#
Palestinians have watched this arithmetic before. The same appropriations bills carry military aid to Israel, and the same committees decide what reaches Palestinian civilians — where UNRWA's American funding sits, and how much of Gaza's reconstruction Washington is willing to underwrite.
The reconstruction fund the World Bank administers for Gaza is still waiting for most of the money pledged to it, while the Pentagon asks Congress for tens of billions more for a war in a third country.
Gallego is one senator, and the funding will most likely pass in some form. What his sentence marks is that the cost of the Iran war has become sayable on Sunday television — the same opening in Washington's debate that Palestinians have been tracking since the war began.
