The cold price of hot blood

A devastating new book reveals that Iraq will cost the U.S. at least $3 trillion. Will Americans check their pocketbooks the next time a president tries to sell them on a cheap, glorious war?

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: George W. Bush, War, Alan Greenspan, Veterans, God, Economy, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq War

March 4, 2008 | Every nation that goes to war makes that war its religion. Wars are always holy, necessary and sacrosanct. That's why asking how much a war costs is blasphemous. It's like asking how much God is worth.

Hence the Bush administration's predictably apoplectic reaction to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes' new book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict." "People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure," White House spokesman Tony Fratto declaimed. "One can't even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11. It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. $3 trillion? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn't his slide rule work that way?"

Since the Iraq war hasn't done anything except endanger the future security of Americans and jeopardize our vital national interests, it's tempting to reply that Fratto's slide rule is the one that's busted. But his overblown rhetoric refutes itself. When official spokesmen accuse a Nobel Prize-winning economist of cowardice, you know that a direct hit has been scored.

As far as I know, Stiglitz and Bilmes' landmark book is the first to break the taboo against counting up the costs of an ongoing war. Not only does it reveal the staggering actual cost of Bush's war of choice -- at least $3 trillion -- it details what we could have done with that money if we had spent it more wisely. The book also argues that Iraq is partly responsible for the nation's current economic crisis: The Federal Reserve Bank under Alan Greenspan tried to offset the adverse effects of the war by lowering interest rates, which helped cause the subprime debacle when interest rates inevitably rose.

The import of their insistence on looking at the war's cost now, while it's still in progress, can't be underestimated. By forthrightly acknowledging that armed conflict should be subject to a cost-benefit analysis, they implicitly puncture the sacrosanct aura of patriotism surrounding war -- and make it harder for governments to launch future wars as ill-considered as the present one we find ourselves in.

To put Stiglitz and Bilmes' $3 trillion in perspective, it's worth comparing it to the cost estimates Bush officials bandied about before the war began. The authors present a damning "Nightline" transcript in which one official, Andrew Natsios, blandly told Ted Koppel that Iraq could be completely reconstructed for only $1.7 billion. (With the war now costing $12.5 billion a month, Natsios' estimate would have been accurate if he had stipulated that it would pay for four days' worth of reconstruction. Which, considering the delusional nature of most of the Bush administration's pre-invasion estimates, may have been how long it thought it would take to rebuild the country.) Other officials settled on a figure of $50 billion to $60 billion. Larry Lindsey, Bush's economic advisor, went way out on a limb, suggesting that the war might cost $200 billion -- a figure derided by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as "baloney." Rumsfeld refused even to offer a range of estimates, saying, "I've already decided that. It's not useful." He was right: It would not have been useful for those ginning up support for a war to predict that it might cost $3 trillion.

In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war had so far cost about $500 billion. That figure was obviously far higher than initial Bush administration estimates, but Stiglitz and Bilmes suspected it was still much too low. After researching the issue, they published a paper in January 2006 that conservatively estimated that the true cost of the war would be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. Even at the time, they regarded that estimate as excessively conservative, but didn't want to appear extreme. Stiglitz and Bilmes' book, which is based on that paper, doubles their earlier estimates to $3 trillion, making Iraq the second most expensive war in U.S. history, trailing only World War II, which cost an adjusted $5 trillion (and in which 16.3 million Americans served in the armed forces, with 400,000 dying). But the authors regard even their new figure as conservative: Their estimates range from $2 trillion, in the best-case scenario in which the U.S. withdraws all combat troops by 2012 and fewer veterans need medical and disability pay, to more than $5 trillion. Add in the cost to the rest of the world, and the price tag could exceed $6 trillion.

As the authors detail, the Bush administration has used every trick in the book to hide the real price tag -- concealing non-combat casualty figures, keeping double sets of books, not factoring in support troops, and allowing the Pentagon to produce budgets so contradictory, obscure and incompetently presented that there is literally no way to determine how much it has spent. The authors had to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain much of the information in their book.

But the administration's biggest sleight of hand has been ignoring the enormous future costs of caring for the hundreds of thousands of disabled veterans who will require vast medical and disability payments, many for the rest of their lives. Those costs will be staggering: an estimated $717 billion. Relatively little attention is paid to those costs, because they haven't shown up on the books yet. But as the authors point out in one of the book's more arresting statistics, they're coming: We're already paying $4.3 billion a year to the veterans of the first Gulf War, which lasted less than two months and in which only 148 U.S. soldiers were killed.

Veterans' costs for the current Iraq war will certainly dwarf that figure. Tens of thousands of troops will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from a war so stressful some experts have compared it to Vietnam. To these grievous mental wounds, which can require a lifetime of expensive treatments, one must add the unprecedented percentage of troops suffering horrific physical injuries. Thanks to body armor, fast airlifts to hospitals and advances in medical treatment, many more severely wounded vets are returning home, where they require ongoing medical and disability care. One army neurosurgeon calls the injuries "the severest ... I've seen in my career."

Next page: War proponents never want to admit the real cost of treating veterans