US war in Iraq: the financial cost to Americans

Nobel Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have recently tallied the overall cost to the US economy of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq at $3 trillion. I haven’t read enough of their study to understand what assumption they are using there for the future length of the war going forward. (Can anybody know that at this point? If John McCain is serious about committing the US to the battlefield there for “100 years”, then at what point do the costs of that engagement become simply unquantifiable? Pretty soon into the 100 years, I’d say.)
Next week we will mark the fifth anniversary of this tragic engagement. In those five years Iraq, the country, has been essentially destroyed. Scores of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis have lost their lives. More than four million of them have been displaced within or outside the country’s borders. Compared with the suffering that the war has inflicted on Iraqis, it seems almost trivial to mention the loss it has inflicted on the US citizenry. Nearly 4,000 volunteer service members have been killed, and tens of thousands more left with lasting physical injuries; hundreds of thousands with mental and spiritual injuries. (Remembering that just about all Iraq’s 30 million people have been left with mental and spiritual injuries by the war.)
And then, there is also the cost of the financial costs to the US citizenry, which in themselves are by no means trivial.
What was the war alleged to be “about”, again? Oh, WMDs, you might remember. SUNY Purchase professor Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has tallied the total budget of the UN’s 2002 inspection operation in Iraq (UNMOVIC) at “approximately $80 million, which includes the initial purchase of permanent equipment.” The budget of UNMOVIC’s predecessor, UNSCOM was “$25-30 million per year.” What is more, UNSCOM worked! Its operations and attentiveness did indeed lead to Saddam Hussein ending and destroying all his WMD programs sometime in the mid 1990s.
So imagine if, in 2002, in response to all the– as it turned out, completely hyped up, cherry-picked, and perhaps downright fabricated– allegations about Saddam still having WMD programs, the US had allowed the UN simply to continue with the UNMOVIC program, which was much more intrusive yet than the UNSCOM program.
(Which had worked… Did I mention that before?)
It would have cost the international community around $80 million a year.
Instead of which, the US taxpayers, with almost no help from anyone else (and after all, why should they?) are currently paying out on the continuing war in Iraq at a rate that Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate at $12 billion per month. That is, $144 billion per year.
Back in January 2003, when I went with my friends from the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice to the City Council hearing at which our city became formally designated as a “City for Peace”, I spoke to the councillors and explained how– after my study of Israel’s lengthy military invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon, I had noted the degree to which maintaining that occupation had become a massive drag on Israel’s economy. (I wrote about that, too, in those pre-war months of 2003.) And I told the city councillors that it was evident that:

(1) the US would find it far harder to get out of Iraq than it was to get in, in spite of all the talk about a “cake-walk”, etc;
(2) The costs of the maintaining the post-invasion occupation would be huge, and mounting;
(3) Just the logistics costs alone, of sustaining a massive occupation force at such a distance from the US’s own borders, would be exponentially higher than the comparable costs had been for Israel, given that Lebanon was right next door; and
(4) All this money would have to come from somewhere; and it would in fact come out of the US’s ability to provide decent basic services for its own citizens at home, which meant that it would be communities like Charlottesville that would end up suffering.

Guess what. It has all been happening.
This morning, as I drove from C’ville up to Washington DC I was listening to the hearing the Senate Appropriations Committee held on the costs of the war. Depressing, indeed. But at least we have a democratic majority in the senate which is holding hearings like this. I thought the Committee Chair pro-tem Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) did a great job.