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Friday, October 28, 2011
Iraq war will cost more than World War II
Iraq war will cost more than World War II
The Christian Science Monitor by David R. Francis
Anyone curious about the cost of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can look it up on costofwar.com, up to the latest fraction of a second. Last weekend, the Iraq war had cost more than $800 billion since 2001; the Afghan war, $467 billion plus...So President Obama’s announcement that all US troops will be out of Iraq by year end should mean some drop in ongoing military spending. But the budget relief probably won’t be as much as you might expect.
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As hateful and morally degrading (and expensive) as the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc. are, this article is misleading. Is calculates the Bush-Obama wars including the VA and other costs that Bilmes and Stiglitz (properly) include and compares it to a cost for World War II that is just the Departments of War and the Navy, not including the huge VA and other costs during and after WWII. See the attached CRS study for more and see the far more comprehensive CostS of War study (at http://costsofwar.org/) than the other linked in the article. It is precisely this sort of (I'll be kind and say) poor analysis that got us into the mess in the first place; the probability that one might agree with the bias does not excuse the wrongness of either of the facts or the methodology.
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