| This thread is a spin-off of the "So what then?" thread right before it.
We got pretty into that issue there, and taking it to a new thread seemed like the right thing to do, particularly since that one was getting unwieldy at 120+ posts.
This aspect of the war has been overshadowed by the human cost aspect. Rightly so in that human costs are far more grave, but we should still look at the question of what this is costing us.
The best single source for war cost data is probably the paper by economics Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, here www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/cost_of_war_in_iraq.pdf
It's estimate is between $750 billion and 1.2 trillion. One caveat regarding that paper is that it was written last year, and it's calculations anticipate a drawdown of US forces starting in 2006 and going on through 2007, when in fact the opposite has happened.
As far as more recent materials, there's a spate of press articles going around, most of which are a *lot* less thorough than Stiglitz. They focus primarily on the 'headline item' that the Iraq war is going to surpass the cost of the Vietnam war (in constant dollars) early next year. Here's a random one:
Alternatively, you can run your own FV calculation. Unavoidably that's rather crude, but it's useful when looking at the hypothesis that "we should stay in there as long as it takes to get the job done" - 15 years, 18 years, whatever - people have all sort of hypothesis about what that may mean.
My views are that;
1- This war is *wildly* expensive; already north of $1 trillion with current commitments, and will in all probability continue to rise well past it.
2- The costs of the war are being intentionally obfuscated by the George jr Administration. Further, they are financed primarily through debt so he can still claim to be a "conservative".
3- A victory at this cost is not victory at all even if it does come, which is far from clear in this case.
The way I look at it is that there are plenty of good reasons why Democracies dont have much of an appetite for long term nation-building exercises abroad, particularly if they involve years of fighting heavily entrenched foreign insurgencies.
It's not just that they fail (as most do); it's also that the price tag for such adventures is so extravagantly expensive make them a very poor use of our money even in the highly unlikely scenario that we do succeed.
Heart,
eu4ea |
