W. and the damage done

IRAQ

How many times have you heard, "With the money we spend in Iraq in just one week ..."?

So how much has that been, exactly? Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and co-author with economist Joseph Stiglitz of "The Three Trillion Dollar War," thinks the figure in her book's title is, if anything, too low. (Bilmes and Stiglitz put the full price of all Bush administration debacles at $10 trillion in their own excellent damage report for the January issue of Harper's.)

"I think it's still a good figure. It was always a conservative figure. We essentially just took the amount of money that we spent to date, the sort of minimum that we are going to need to spend on veterans' disability benefits, veterans' disability, weapons that have been used up, interest on the money we've borrowed. And then there are some of the economic costs. There are social costs, like parents or spouses of wounded veterans who have to leave their jobs after parents come back. And there are economic costs, such as oil disruption."

Cost: From the start of the war through 2017, "You can't get any lower than $3 trillion."

And a gradual drawdown of troops isn't going to make it better, Bilmes says. Maintaining any presence at all in Iraq entails what economists call high fixed costs. Whether we've got 10,000 troops or 15,000 at a base, that base is still going to cost a lot to maintain. Hence, when the British withdrew half their forces from Basra, their costs fell by an almost imperceptible 3 percent.

Since $3 trillion is hard to digest, let's itemize some of the costs in Bilmes and Stiglitz's comprehensive figure.

Amount of money earned by a married U.S. Army sergeant with children per day in Iraq in 2007: $170

Amount of money earned by a Blackwater military contractor per day: $600

Number of U.S. military deaths as of Jan. 7, 2009: 4,222

Average cost of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle: $3.166 million

Cost of the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad: $592 million

Cost to conduct the war per month: $12 billion

Amount the Bush administration estimated the war would cost from start to finish: $60 billion

The cost to "fix" the military: Meaning, to restore battered and depleted personnel and materiel. Larry Korb, a defense analyst at the Center for American Progress, thinks we're talking about $250 billion. "In terms of materiel, obviously, if you're talking fiscally, you've got the reset cost of the equipment that's been destroyed, used up, burned in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you've got at least $100 billion. So that's one cost, because you assume this is going to last longer, when you bought it." And then there's personnel: recruitment bonuses, the new GI bill, pay raises. Korb's guess is about another $150 billion there. And this isn't money that we'll necessarily recoup when the war ends. "You can never roll those back," he says of the GI bill and bonuses.

And, while these estimates overlap with those made by Bilmes, they don't even account for most of the increased defense spending. The Pentagon's budget is up about 40 percent since Bush's inauguration, says Korb. "I'd only say about one-quarter is due to the things we spoke about. The other is just poor management. You have the cost overruns in weapons systems, $400 billion in weapons systems since they came in."

HUMAN RIGHTS

One of President Obama's important early tasks will be dismantling the culture of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the web of white papers and executive orders that jeopardized habeas corpus and allowed -- encouraged -- torture.

The damage to the image of America may be long-term. Karen Greenberg, the executive director of New York University's Center on Law and Security, says that the stain on America's reputation among foreigners and, for that matter, Americans can never be removed.

"And it sullied -- not so much our reputation, because that's the obvious -- it sullied on some level how we think of ourselves," says Greenberg. "You can't undo the damage that torture's done. You took something out of a box that has vast repercussions, and gave people a chance and a reason to defend a practice that brings out rather horrific things about human beings for very little, for no gain. So the way to go about the torture thing is in a very definitive way. Which is, we're not going to do it. The policy prescription is not to have a policy. We don't torture."

Our methods in the war on terror, says Greenberg, expose a fundamental lack of faith in the ability of democracy to achieve policy successes. "The biggest cost of torture was that it eroded the confidence of the American people. Because if you choose bullying as your method, you are saying, we don't trust ourselves to have the skills, whether they are the intelligence skills, or the law enforcement skills, to be the best in the game and the best and the brightest on the issues that are part of our national security."

But there are also quantifiable costs to holding enemy combatants indefinitely, and creating military commissions to try them.

Number of detainees who have died in U.S custody: Human Rights First claimed that as of February 2006, nearly 100 had died, a figure the Pentagon disputes. In addition, Amnesty International says that more than three dozen individuals believed to have been in U.S. custody have essentially disappeared.

Cost of building and staffing detention facilities at Guantánamo: More than $400 million as of December 2008. Yet to be determined: the price for trying the 250 detainees who remain, or any civil suits that might be forthcoming.

HURRICANE KATRINA

When Katrina's winds were finally quiet, they had left in their wake a mountain of statistical testimony to the power of a hurricane and the incompetence of the government officials who were supposed to deal with it. Fifteen million people on the Gulf Coast were affected and 400,000 jobs and 275,000 homes were lost. The most important statistic of all is the number of deaths. Estimates vary greatly, but deaths directly caused by the August 2005 storm are generally believed to be in excess of 1,100, perhaps about 1,500, with total direct and indirect deaths in excess of 1,800. Another 700 or so people are still missing. Many thousands more, however, who fled Louisiana to escape the storm have never come back. The city's population is still only at 72 percent of its pre-Katrina level of 450,000. Louisiana and North Dakota are the only two states whose populations declined between 2000 and 2008.

But let's talk about money.

Cost to the federal government: As of mid-2006, Congress had approved $122 billion in funds for the region. FEMA had paid $19 billion.

Cost to insurers: A month after the storm, the insurance industry gave the preliminary figure of $34.4 billion. A year later, the number was $40.6 billion.  Harry Richardson, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California and editor of a collection of scholarly articles called "Natural Disaster Analysis After Katrina," notes, grimly, that any assessments of the storm's impact should also include financial losses because of fatality. "Generally we estimate the value of life -- even for poor people -- at about $5 million per person. So if you wanted to estimate the cost in human life, you could multiply that [times the number of deaths]." At 1,800 deaths, that's another $9 billion or so.

There has also been a financial impact on people who were spared the wrath of Katrina, who have never heard of a levee and live far from Louisiana and Mississippi. Home insurance has become more costly and/or more difficult to procure. After the storm, many national insurers simply stopped issuing policies for homes that were too close to coastlines.

Cost to repair the levees in New Orleans: $1 billion, with no guarantee, as sea levels rise and hurricanes increase in intensity, that they will hold.

Next page: "I put this squarely at the foot of the Bush Administration"