Cost of Iraq War Now Beyond Human Comprehension

[babylonsister]

Cost of Iraq War Now Beyond Human Comprehension

By William D. Hartung, Tomdispatch.com. Posted March 5, 2008.

War is hell -- deadly, dangerous, and expensive. But just how expensive is it?


How far off were they? Well, it depends on which figure you choose to start with. Here's the range: According to key officials in the Bush administration back in 2002-2003, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq was either going to cost $60 billion, or $100-$200 billion. Actually, we can start by tossing that top figure out, since not long after Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey offered it in 2002, he was shown the door, in part assumedly for even suggesting something so ludicrous.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz championed the $60 billion figure, but added that much of the cost might well be covered by Iraqi oil revenues; the country was, after all, floating on a "sea of oil." ("To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he told a congressional hearing.) Still, let's take that $60 billion figure as the Bush baseline. If economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes are right in their recent calculations and this will turn out to be more than a $3 trillion war (or even a $5-7 trillion one), then the Bush administration was at least $2,940,000,000,000 off in its calculations.

That definitely qualifies as a ballpark figure for an administration that never saw a budget estimate for one of its imperial dreams that it couldn't hike. Take just one of its major "reconstruction" projects: getting the vast U.S. embassy staff out of a former palace of Saddam Hussein and into a brand-new, almost Vatican-sized "embassy," a genuine mother ship, being built from the ground up inside Baghdad's heavily fortified (and often heavily shelled) Green Zone. Originally scheduled to open in mid-2007, what will undoubtedly be the largest "diplomatic" mission on the planet was initially budgeted for $592 million. Predictably, its price tag soared another $144 million, and now comes in at $736 million, as yet unopened. In December 2007, the State Department officially certified it "substantially complete," but, as with most Bush administration construction projects in that country, it remains in a state of staggering unreadiness; two of the State Department employees who worked on it are now "under criminal investigation"; and the State Department is dragging its feet about handing over relevant documents to Congress. Ho-hum.

Nothing, of course, has been cheap for American taxpayers who are financing the Bush administration's war policies. It's been like putting up money for an administration staffed by shopaholics let loose in Neiman Marcus or gambling addicts freed to roam Las Vegas with no betting limits.

But what does money matter? After all, this administration has been spending as if there were no tomorrow. And now, with tomorrow staring them in the face, the latest scare tactic seems to be claiming that doing anything about present policies will simply be ... too expensive. Not long after the price of oil crested above $103 a barrel, Karl Rove, for instance, predicted that any serious "redeployment" from Iraq would mean ... $200 a barrel oil.

Sigh ... Fortunately, we've got William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, to try to put Bush spending policies in its wars of choice into perspective.

more...

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/78683/?page=entire

[Richard D]

1. I had a little fun with a calculator . . .

. . . which I think is correct to try to visualize what 6 trillion dollars would look like. Here it is:

Imagine this: A stack of hundred dollar bills, not old ones, but new, crisp ones, packed so tightly that there is no air between them. Each stack has 10 thousand dollars in it.

Now, take a lot of these stacks of 100 dollar bills. Enough, tightly packed, to reach all the way to Florence, Italy, not stopping for the Atlantic Ocean, but continuing unbroken from the Pacific coast of Santa Monica all the way to downtown Florence.

Were you walking along this stack, each step would have you passing about 400 thousand dollars (slightly less for women). All the way to Florence, Italy.

And then you could walk another 100 miles past that.

How much money would you pass? It's an interesting number. About 6 trillion dollars.

That's what the Iraq War is costing. Six trillion dollars. A tightly packed stack of 100 dollar bills from Los Angeles to Italy. About 660,780 tons of hundred dollar bills.

At a thousand dollars a second, it would take you 192 years to count them all.

John McCain envisions the war lasting another 50-100 years.

How many times around the globe would that stack then be?

[Festivito]

4. Or, $20K/ American! GOT A family of 4: $80K plus debt & mortgage.

$20,000 per American for 300 million Americans to owe 6 trillion.

Plus the national debt at OVER 9 trillion.
$30,000 per American

That's $50,000 per American.

Have a family of four? $100,000.
Buying a house? Add $100,000 of debt for a $150,000 house.

You own a $150,000 house and owe $200,000.

Congratulations.

[elehhhhna]

2. That headline sounds like an Onion front pager! Yikes.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

3. K&R n/t

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. As a blogger put it: Shoes? Aston Martins?

If Bush had spent that $3,000,000,000,000 on shoes, no American child would ever have to wear the same shoes more than once. Or he could have bought everyone in Iraq an Aston Martin. Those would be the actions of a madman, of course, yet still more sensible than what he actually did do.

http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/2008/03/opportunity-cost.html

[YankmeCrankme]

6. I always like this analogy

Difference between a billion and a trillion.

If you had a billion dollars and spent a million dollars a day it would last about 3 years.

If you had a trillion dollars and spent a million dollars a day it would last about 3,000 years.

Actually, I heard this first from Johnny Carson during the Tonight Show in the 1980's, but he referenced the difference between one million and one billion and spending only 1,000 dollars a day!