By Xinhua,
Washington : U.S. President George W. Bush signed a war funding bill worth 162 billion U.S. dollars on Monday, the last one in his tenure.
The bill will cover war expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan well into the middle of next year, after Bush leaves office in January 2009.
The bill’s passage in the U.S. Senate and House is a victory for Bush, as the Congress had to remove a language mandating a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq from the bill’s original version after the president’s veto threat.
Nevertheless, the bill did attach some strings to the war spending in two ways. First, it forbids the U.S. military to construct permanent bases in Iraq, and second, for every U.S. dollar the United States spends in Iraq’s reconstruction, the government of Iraq has to match it with one dollar from its own treasury.
The new funding will push the total war spending on Iraq to 650billion dollars, and the total spending of the “war against terror” will be 850 billion dollars if the spending on Afghanistan is included.