Whats Three Trillion More or Less?

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have just published a book called "The Three Trillion Dollar War." Remember in those heady days of yore when the cost of the war was going to be born by oil revenues? Yet one more piece of the war that didn't quite go the way they promised us. (What, you say? The Bush Administration lead us astray? Say it isn't so!)

Here's a bit of the reality check from Stiglitz and Bilmes, courtesy of the Times / UK online:

The cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.

And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion (that's $5 million million, or £2.5 million million). With virtually the entire armed forces committed to fighting the Germans and Japanese, the cost per troop (in today's dollars) was less than $100,000 in 2007 dollars. By contrast, the Iraq war is costing upward of $400,000 per troop.

Did you get all of that? Getting rid of Saddam and getting mired in the muck of our own making has cost us TWICE AS MUCH as it cost to get rid of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. And the cost of the war is more than $400,000 per US troop. Almost half a million per man or woman over there fighting this thing is what we're spending. And we already know how little of those funds go to actually protect those men and women.