The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict

The Bush administration told taxpayers that the Iraq war would cost about $50 billion dollars and be paid for by that country's oil revenues. Joseph Stiglitz, chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and a 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, estimate that the real cost of the war is three trillion dollars. And that's almost certainly a "gross underestimate" due to the conservative methods and estimates used in their calculations. Even worse, because of the gross incompetence and deliberate secrecy of the DOD accounting procedures, no one can know the true cost of the war. If you divide three trillion dollars by the number of households in the United States, you get $25,000 per household. That's your share for the Iraq war. But don't worry. You won't have to pay because because the war has been funded entirely by borrowing money. We'll let others pay our debts. Plus, the economic costs of the war are off the books, above and beyond the DOD's bloated budget. The richest country in the world, the authors observe, hasn't been able or willing to live within its means. But there's a "simple message of this book, one that needs to be repeated over and over again: there is no free lunch, and no free wars. In one way or another, we will pay these bills." We're already paying heavy "opportunity costs." The human consequences of the war have been as disastrous as the economic costs. After five years, the most powerful country in the world, a country that spends more on its military than all other countries combined, hasn't been able to subdue a country with only 10 percent of its size and 1 percent of its GDP. Iraq's middle class has been ravaged. A majority of its children don't attend school. The country now has only half the number of doctors as before the war. As of September 2007, over 4 million Iraqis (one of every seven) had been displaced from their homes. Oil has soared from $25 a barrel to $100 a barrel since the war began, making the oil companies (along with defense contractors) one of the few beneficiaries of war. Over 751,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have already been discharged from the military will need medical care and benefits the rest of their lives (1.6 million men and women have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan). Yes, it would be a disaster for us to leave Iraq. But the longer we wait, the more disastrous these consequences will be for the US, for Iraq, and for the world. With no exit plan in sight, and Bush intent upon running out the clock in order to pass the problem to the next president, it looks like we'll delay that debacle just as we've pushed the economic costs into the future. Given these economic and human costs, it's unconscionable that any administration can act with such impunity.

This is one of those very rare endeavors that is a tour d'force on multiple fronts, and easy to read and understand to boot. It is a down-to-earth, capably documented indictment of the Bush-Cheney Administration's malicious or delusional--take your pick--march to war on false premises. As a policy "speaking truth to power" book; as an economic treatise, as an academic contribution to the public debate, and as a civic duty, this book is extraordinary. Highlights that sparked my enthusiasm: 1) Does what no one else has done, properly calculates and projects the core cost of war--and the core neglect of the Bush-Cheney Administration in justifying, excusing, and concealing the true cost of war: it fully examines the costs of caring for returning veterans (which some may recall, return at a rate of 16 to 1 instead of the older 6 to 1 ratio of surviving wounded to dead on the battlefield). 2) Opens with a superb concise overview of the trade-off costs--what the cost of war could have bought in terms of education, infrastructure, housing, waging peace, etcetera. I am particularly taken with the authors' observation that the cost of 10 days of this war, $5 billion, is what we give to the entire continent of Africa in a year of assistance. 3) Fully examines how costs exploded--personnel costs, fuel costs, and costs of replacing equipment. The authors do NOT address two important factors: + Military Construction under this Administration has boomed. Every Command and base has received scores of new buildings, a complete face lift, EXCEPT for the WWII-era huts where those on the way to Iraq and Afghanistan are made to suffer for three months before they actually go to war. + The Services chose not to sacrifice ANY of their big programs, and this is a major reason why the cost of the war is off the charts--we are paying for BOTH three wars (AF, IQ, GWOT) AND the "business as usual" military acquisition program which is so totally broken that it is virtually impossible to "buy a ship" with any degree of economy or efficiency. 4) The authors excel at illuminating the faulty accounting, the subversion of the budget process, and they offer ten steps to correction that I will not list here, but are alone worth the price of the book. What they do not tell us is: + Congress rolled over and played dead, abdicating its Article 1 responsibilities--the Republicans as footsoldiers, the Democrats as doormats. + The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has not done the "M" since the 1970's and is largely worthless today as a "trade-off manager" for the President. 5) I am blown away by the clear manner in which the authors' show the skyrocketing true cost up from a sliver of the "original estimate" out to a previously unimaginable 2.7 trillion (cost to US only, not rest of world). The interest cost in particular is mind-boggling. 6) They note that the costs the government does NOT pay include: + Loss of life and work potential for the private sector

I generally have a hard time dealing with writing that deals with accounting. I was not a business major, and it is hard for me to follow some of the monetary flows. It was startling to me when I discovered that this book was very easy to follow and was written for the average person. It is well written, with wonderful documentation and an easy to read and follow style. The numbers presented are mind boggling and numbing. How do you account for such huge numbers, and why haven't we known before that the numbers were this big? The answer lies, primarily, in accounting tricks used by the government to hide certain expenses of to put them off onto other budgets so that the true cost could never be accurately accounted for. It's quite a statement that the DOD flunked its last 7 audits; a trick that would send private company executives to prison. If you really want to know what the war will cost, where each of those costs is hidden and what those costs consist of, then this book is well worth the money. Every American should read this book now, before the election, to truly understand how we have been hoodwinked.

Three trillion dollars for the war in Iraq is an incredible amount, almost beyond comprehension, and certainly far beyond the figures provided by the Bush administration. Yet this total is made both credible and comprehensible through the documentation of Joseph Stiglitz (2001 Nobel Prize-winner in economics, and Professor at Columbia) and Linda Bilmes, Harvard University expert on public policy and finance. Compelling alternative uses for the money are numerous. For example, we could have put Social Security on sound financial footing for a fraction of that cost, and avoided the nearly 4,000 American deaths (plus $500,000/death benefits) and 100,000 estimated Iraqi deaths - plus an untold number of seriously wounded and their long-term disability and health costs. (Stiglitz found that 40% of Gulf War troops were declared disabled, and that was only a one month war; he sees Pentagon estimates of Gulf War II wounded and disabled as grossly understated, and documents that conclusion. Another key point - peak expenditures for WWII veterans did not occur until 1993; thus this war will affect spending decades into the future.) Alternatively, America's trillion dollar+ infrastructure needs could be met with only half that expense. Other costs include skyrocketing re-enlistment bonuses (up to $150,000 - their alternative is personal safety or much higher-paid private security work), the extra costs of using reserve and guard troops, up to $1,222/day for private security guards to replace servicemen paid less than one-sixth that, lost billions to reconstruct Iraq and spent in non-competitive bidding, and massive equipment replacement costs. Then there are the opportunity costs associated with spending the money overseas, with no return to the American economy, increased pressure on the dollar, and the likely increased cost of oil. Finally, what about the interest costs of financing this war with debt, and our increased reliance on foreign nations holding that debt? Supposedly this war is being fought to promote democracy. Yet, as Stiglitz points out, it is being mostly sold and funded through hiding the costs from the public. Continuing our presence in Iraq may, with interest, raise the total to $6-7 trillion. Meanwhile, bin Laden roams free, and even more Islamicists hate us. "The Three Trillion Dollar War" is MUST reading.

This book not only describes the cost of the Iraq War long term, but explains how billions of dollars were wasted in Iraq due to the total corruption of the Bush administration, starting with Bush refusing to allow open bidding on the contracts to rebuild Iraq. Those contract then went to his or the Vice President's cronies. In addition the Bush administration makes no mention of the long term costs of the injured soldiers returning from Iraq. Bush has also lied to the American people about the number of injured soldiers and after being caught on the government's own web site, they took the site down.