The 300 Trillion Dollar War!

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	• The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict Joseph E. Stiglitz, Linda J. Bilmes W. W. Norton, 2008 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 27 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The 300 Trillion Dollar War!

I'm no economist, and definitely not a Nobel Prize winning one, but by my calculations Joseph Stiglitz has under-estimated the cost of the Iraq war by a factor of 100 in his recently released The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

The difference in our calculations is simple enough: I've assumed that the citizens of the United States and Iraq have an equal value. Stiglitz and his co-author Linda Blimes, on the other hand, made a conscious decision to limit their calculations to the cost of the war to the USA.

Fifty billion of the three trillion they estimate the war is costing the USA is arrived at by putting a statistical value on the life of each American killed in Iraq (be they soldiers or contractors) of $7.2 million.

Using an estimate of 700,000 Iraqi dead, quoted by Stiglitz and Blimes, and applying the $7.2 million worth to each of those individuals we come to a cost of 5.04 trillion. And then if we assume that represents about one sixtieth of the total cost to the country concerned, as it does in Stiglitz's comprehensive estimates for the US economy, we come to a figure of 302 trillion dollars.

Okay, so there are a lot of assumptions in those calculations. It's clear that the cost to Iraq of its bombed infrastructure, the exodus of its professional class, the displacement of over 2.2 million people, the ongoing sectarian violence unleashed by the invasion and the hundreds of thousands of maimed individuals won't be exactly comparable to the price being paid by the USA - so the one to 60 ratio may be wrong. (You be the judge of whether it's likely to be too high or too low.)

I went along to hear Stiglitz take part in a discussion entitled The Cost of Iraq at Writers and Readers Week in Wellington, New Zealand, last month, hoping to hear an explanation for the decision not to include figures on the cost of the war to Iraqis - the victims of the illegal invasion.

It wasn't to be.

The session, ably chaired by TV3's John Campbell featured Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, English novelist and former journalist James Meek, and Australian theatre director Nigel Jamieson.

The cost to Iraqis was touched on only twice in the 75-minute session. Once in John Campbell's opening spiel when he mentioned the difficulty of knowing just how many Iraqis have died and then when James Meek read an excerpt from one of his last dispatches from Iraq. Written while he was an embedded journalist, the article described watching as a US lawyer dished out $500 to a family of an Iraqi killed by American troops.

It's a superb piece of writing and an important reminder that embedded journalists can - even if most don't - continue to do an important job.

The US Government pays $500,000 to the families of US service men and women killed in the conflict. Which raises an interesting question of the relative worth of US and Iraqi life.

The panel, sadly, moved on without confronting that issue.

It's plainly an uncomfortable topic and as Stiglitz explained to Mother Jones, one that he and his co-author decided was best left alone. Including Iraqi deaths in the calculations would have raised "the question of whether you should or should not value an Iraqi life differently from an American life. That raises fundamental ethical issues, and we didn't want a debate on those issues to detract from the fundamental issue of what America is paying for the war that it brought."

They've definitely avoided the distraction, but at the cost of exacerbating a growing tendency to view the war as a US tragedy rather than an Iraqi one.

If the cost to Iraqis was made clear, perhaps the international demands for reparations for the Iraqi people would grow to a point where they would be included in what America must pay for the "war that it brought."

Returning US soldiers are currently among the few voices calling for the US to pay reparations as Phyllis Bennis recently told the Real News Network. Could that be because they're among the few Americans who know anything about what's actually going on? As Bennis also reports, news about the Iraq war now only makes up one percent of total US news coverage.

The costs that the panel discussion did focus on included: the loss of America's moral leadership (No one laughed. I'm not sure that any state can really claim to offer moral leadership, but the idea that the government of the country that carpet-bombed Cambodia, trained generations of torturers for the dictatorships of Latin America and toppled democratic governments in Chile and Iran had any moral leadership to lose is surely worthy of a chuckle.)

Garry Trudeau spoke of the damage to America's soul caused by the torture at Guantanamo Bay. I'm sure he's right but wonder whether we wouldn't be better focusing on the damage being done to the bodies of its victims.

Stiglitz and Blimes do dedicate 12 pages of their book to the cost of the war to Iraq. They're excellent. They point out that if Iraqi civilian deaths were given the same statistical value they've placed on US lives the cost to Iraq by 2010 would be a staggering $8.6 triillion.

The problem I have with The Three Trillion Dollar War is not one of content but emphasis.

If the delusional Bush vision of a self-financing war had become a reality, would the war be any less objectionable?

After his searing indictment of the working conditions in American meat works, The Jungle, resulted in a commission of inquiry into the safety of the meat coming out those works, Upton Sinclair said he had aimed at the heart of Americans and hit them in the stomach.

By aiming so squarely at the pockets of middle Americans Stiglitz and Blimes seem to be saying their compatriots' hearts are too tricky a target to bother with.

This review was first published by the Scoop Review of Books http://books.scoop.co.nz

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A "must read" for patriots

"The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict" is an eye-opening confirmation of what many of us have been saying for some time -- the cost of the war announced by the government is but the tip of a very ugly iceberg. In a scrupulously researched and heavily footnoted essay, Stiglitz and Bilmes prove that the true cost of the war is at least three trillion dollars. But their book does much more. It proposes specific reforms that will ensure that in the future the American people will know the rough cost of a war before getting into it.

These proposals are perhaps the most valuable part of the book. They include such common-sense ideas as returning to the Constitutional requirement of a Congressional declaration of war, requiring a full estimate of the likely cost of the war, and a mandate that taxes be raised to pay for these costs. This would mean that the American people as a whole would bear some of the pain, not just the families of young men and women subjected to an "economic draft." And the people would know in advance what their politicians were getting them into. Altogether, they propose 18 reforms (many of which I have been touting for some time), and I intend to see that all of them become part of my "platform." (Reviewed by Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret., National Commander "The Patriots" www.thepatriots.us )

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An author with street cred

Joseph Stiglitz, co-author of this book, has street cred, since he is a Nobel laureate. That said, I suspect that there will be predictable responses to this book. Those who oppose the war will love it; those who support the Iraq War will be displeased. That is unfortunate in that, even though Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes are clearly anti-war and anti-Bush, there are still many useful contributions of this book, as it addresses its purpose (Page xvii): "Our goal was simple: to determine the true cost of the war. regardless of whether one supported or opposed U.S. actions in the region, we believed that voters had a right to know the real cost of our policies."

The authors note that four factors have pushed increased direct spending in Iraq and Afghanistan and, overall, the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism): costs of increased number of troops; rising cost of personnel (military forces plus contractors); increasing cost of fuel; keeping equipment in working condition and replacing deteriorated equipment. However, the authors also note that these direct costs of the conflict understate what the actual cost is (and will be). The costs not showing up in official budget numbers: cost of over 4,000 dead troops; the large number of casualties and the care that will be needed to address their injuries; interest payments on the borrowing for the war. They also note that it is difficult to calculate actual costs because the national government accounting system is phony, and would not be tolerated in the private sector. The "cash accounting" system actually hides future costs. They conclude their estimate that the real costs of the war will be around $3 trillion.

As they estimate costs in area after area, they note that (Page 55) "There is a simple message in this book, one that needs to be repeated over and over again: there is no free lunch, and there are no free wars." Pages 57-59 lay out their estimated budgetary costs of the war, category by category.

Following chapters examine issues such as the cost of caring for veterans, costs of war that the government doesn't pay (e.g., lost productive capacity of those Americans killed or seriously wounded or suffering mental health problems, and so on), macroeconomic effects of the war (e.g., rising price of oil, opportunity costs of funds not being available for other socially useful projects, borrowing for the war crowds out money available for domestic investment [the tally of such costs shows up on page 130]), other costs imposed on the global community (e.g., costs to Great Britain).

They conclude with a series of lessons that they believe should lead to reforms, to reduce the odds of such an "adventure" in the future. Some of the suggestions are budgetary, others are structural (making sure that Congress has accurate and relevant information so that it can serve its original role on checks and balances with the President).

This is a good book in that it provides what seem to be some reasonable estimates of the actual cost of the war. There are some problems, though, too. For one, there is at some places political naiveté. For instance, among opportunity costs, they cite the less money is available for important policies such as education, roads, and research. Question: Would such funding be provided, given the political currents in the United States? The fact that funds might be freed up does not mean that they will be spent on such projects as those noted by the authors. Also, their critical orientation toward the President and war almost automatically mean that some readers will turn off in terms of considering the many useful aspects of their work. Finally, while I am not overly optimistic about the end result of our Iraqi involvement, to say that it and must be a failure is a bit too cocky a statement to me. I am pessimistic, but none of us can foresee the future. . . .

Anyhow, this is an important work, rather dry in its style but readable enough.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

The true cost of the Iraq War is $3 trillion?and counting?rather than the $50 billion projected by the White House.

Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. This sobering study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes casts a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans?for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer's money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy. Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the war.

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