Nobelist Stiglitz Tallies Iraq War's Outrageous Cost: Review

Original Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aJWW_q5WSn1I

Review by Charles Taylor

March 4 (Bloomberg) -- The title tells the story of ``The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.'' Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes have produced a devastating argument against the American invasion of Iraq.

By demonstrating that the cost of the war has dealt a body blow to American military preparedness and to the strength of our economy, by laying out the way the war has been financed with budgets beyond our resources, Stiglitz and Bilmes show that the right-wingers still defending the war are acting against bedrock conservative principles.

When it comes to the necessity and probable value of the war, the American right wing cannot decide whether it wants to be Pollyanna, putting a happy face on this mismanaged fiasco, or Emperor Hirohito, insisting on myths of endurance and national might as our resources dwindle.

To the authors' great credit, this book presents not just the economic cost of the war but the price we are paying in both morale and morality.

Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and a Columbia University professor, and Bilmes, of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government (both of them late of the Clinton administration), have calculated what they call a conservative estimate of the war's cost. Total expenditures and appropriations to date are just the beginning. The authors also make plain the expenditures hidden as regular operating costs in the Pentagon budget, and adjust the whole lot for inflation.

Future Costs

They also factor in what the war will cost in the future, including health-care costs for returning veterans and the price of restoring the military (both personnel and equipment) to prewar levels. Stiglitz and Bilmes are careful to add the price of benefits to returning soldiers like Social Security and the G.I. Bill. And they don't forget the interest.

Then there is the effect on the economy from disabled vets not being able to enter the workforce and family members possibly having to drop out of their own jobs to care for them.

Finally, Stiglitz and Bilmes calculate the macroeconomic effect, including money diverted from things like infrastructure repair and education; money needed to pay interest on loans; and the higher oil prices that have resulted from the war. The numbers are thorough and shattering.

But though the authors are persuasive that our continued presence in Iraq may only inflame a volatile situation, they don't adequately address what moral responsibility we have in a mess of our own making. While it's certainly possible that an immediate withdrawal will serve our self-interest as well as Iraq's future, it seems to me a morally lax finish to an already shameful episode. As the poet Philip Larkinwrote in 1969, ``Next year we shall be living in a country / That brought its soldiers home for lack of money ... / Our children will not know it's a different country. / All we can hope to leave them now is money.''

``The Three Trillion Dollar War'' is published by Norton (311 pages, $22.95).