COLUMN LEFT : And Who Will Pay the Piper? : The long-term costs of war will beggar our children’s--and their children’s--futures.

President Bush declared in his State of the Union message that “among the nations of the world, only the United States of America has had both the moral standing and the means to back it up” to fight the Gulf War. He might not have been so confident if the Pentagon had been giving him the full costs of the war.

When the Pentagon offers its daily figures on the war, it is counting costs like salaries, missiles, munitions, air and sea lifts, fuel, military construction, medical, food, water and other support. More telling is what it leaves out. It’s not including veterans’ benefits, nor is it considering interest on the money Uncle Sam will have to borrow to pay for all this.

Announced cost estimates change daily, but the most recent look like this: $11.4 billion for the buildup before Jan. 16; $500 million a day for a 30-day air war, and $2 billion a day for a 30-day ground war. At these rates a 60-day war would run up original costs of roughly $86 billion, a six-month war $331 billion.

This is a lot of money, but it’s only a fraction of the real cost. Veterans’ benefits, particularly medical and pension benefits, will be paid to veterans and their survivors for many years beyond war’s end. In the mid-1970s we were paying more than $1 million a year in veterans’ benefits arising from the Civil War. We’re still paying millions every year for veterans’ benefits from the Spanish-American War, and more than $12 billion a year just for World War II--not to mention World War I, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

Data from previous wars indicate that veterans’ benefits are likely to run at least 278% of a war’s original cost (these are current dollars as reported by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, not discounted or adjusted for price level changes or future benefit increases). Our national experience has shown that payments of these benefits can extend for 120 years beyond a war’s end.

How will we pay these costs? Faced with an enormous budget deficit and the incomplete savings-and-loan bailout, the President and Congress are unlikely to raise taxes. That means Uncle Sam will have to borrow, by selling long-term bonds that won’t be redeemed for years. And when they are redeemed, it will be through higher taxes paid by the kids we’ve sent to fight in the Middle East--and by their kids.

The government currently pays more than 8% a year in interest on its long-term borrowing. Assuming we get around to raising taxes and paying off each new debt within 30 years, the interest cost will be about 240% of the sum of the original war cost plus veterans’ benefits (again, in current dollars neither discounted nor compounded).

So what does it add up to? For a 60-day war, we have $86 billion in the war’s original cost, $239 billion in veterans’ benefits and $780 billion in interest for the staggering total of $1.105 trillion. A six-month war would cost $4.253 trillion --roughly three times the current federal budget. For every year the ground war continues, add another $9.382 trillion.

But these costs don’t begin to measure fully the sacrifice of our nation for this war. They don’t include any allowance for: the lives that will be lost, the pain of the soldiers, the anguish of loved ones; the lost contribution to our economy, measured by the soldiers’ earning power; the responsibility the United States will undoubtedly assume of rebuilding Kuwait, Iraq, and other lands ravaged by the war; the cost of international ill will against the United States, including potential terrorism that restricts the mobility of Americans; the cost to the environment from oil wells burned or emptied into the seas.

Who can comprehend, who can imagine the magnitude of these costs? How can we make sense of them?

For the long-term cost of prosecuting this war for only one month, the United States could do one of the following:

-- Pay for the $500-billion bailout of the savings-and-loan industry.

-- Hire every unemployed person in public works programs at $20,000 a year, for over 6 years.

-- Increase the $61.9-million U.S. contribution to the United Nations peacekeeping forces 12,000 times over.

-- Pay for the gasoline used in passenger vehicles for more than seven years.

-- Increase annual expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools 38 times over.

-- Cover current federal spending on maternal and child health 1,300 times over.

Was President Bush right? Do we have the means to pay for this war? Perhaps--if we’re willing to mortgage our children’s future for the next 120 years.