A LOOK AT THE COST OF THE IRAQ WAR LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE

War is hell - deadly, dangerous and hellishly expensive

By William D Hartung
http://www.atimes.com

But just how expensive is it? In a recent interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz asserted that the costs of the Iraq war - budgetary, economic and societal - could reach US$5 trillion.

That's a hard number to comprehend. Figuring out how many times $5 trillion would circle the globe (if we took it all in $1 bills) doesn't really help matters much, nor does estimating how many times we could paper over every square inch of Rhode Island with it.

The fact that total war costs could buy six trillion donuts for volunteers to the presidential campaigns - assuming a bulk discount - is impressive in its own way, but not all that meaningful either.

In fact, the George W Bush administration's war costs have already moved beyond the human scale of comprehension. But what if we were to try another tack? How about breaking those soaring trillions down into smaller pieces, into mere millions and billions? How much, for instance, does one week of Bush's wars cost?

Glad you asked. If we consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together - which we might as well do, since we and our children and grandchildren will be paying for them together into the distant future - a conservative single-week estimate comes to $3.5 billion.

Remember, that's per week! By contrast, the whole international community spends less than $400 million per year on the International Atomic Energy Agency, the primary institution for monitoring and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; that's less than one day's worth of war costs.

The US government spends just $1 billion per year securing and destroying loose nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials, or less than two days' worth of war costs; and Washington spends a total of just $7 billion per year on combating global warming, or a whopping two weeks' worth of war costs.

So, perhaps you're wondering, what does that $3.5 billion per week actually pay for? And how would we even know? The Bush administration submits a supplemental request - over and above the more than $500 billion per year the Pentagon is now receiving in its official budget - to pay for the purported costs of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and for the global "war on terror".

If you can stay awake long enough to read the whole 159-page document for 2008, it has some fascinating revelations.

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