Costs of war--and bad intelligence.

In September 2002, then-White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey predicted that war with Iraq would cost as much as $200 billion. His candor about the costs of the war got him fired. After all, Lindsey's estimate was denounced as "very, very high" according to Budget Director Mitch Daniels, who stated that the war would cost no more than $60 billion--substantially less than the first Gulf War, which cost $80 billion. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz underbid even that figure, predicting that Iraq's oil revenues would be used to pay for the war--meaning that the conflict would effectively pay for itself.

The initial Bush administration cost projections assumed that the conquest of Iraq would be brief, complete, and almost entirely unopposed. This was the conclusion promoted by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP), an ad-hoc group created through Vice President Cheney's office to circumvent established intelligence channels in the CIA, Defense Department, and State Department. Most of the intelligence community rejected the OSP's conclusions about Saddam's arsenal, connections to al-Qaeda, and the likely consequences of invading Iraq. However, the administration chose to act on the OSP's intelligence, which proved to be nothing but ideologically motivated disinformation. And the costs of that decision will mount into the foreseeable future.

A Congressional Research Service report published in April "concluded that Lindsey's estimate was, indeed, way off--but in the other direction," notes Matthew Yglesias in the July 5 issue of American Prospect. "About $261 billion had already been spent" on the war. But that figure doesn't take into account the radiating social and economic consequences of the war, which will last for decades and inflict tremendous costs on our nation.

"Wartime appropriations do not, for example, include the cost of disability payments to veterans wounded in the war, payments that will continue throughout their life spans," continues Yglesias. "Nor do they cover the costs of medical treatments for those seriously injured in the war, or even such basic war-related costs as the replacement of equipment and munitions expended in the conflict or the need to transport soldiers back to their home bases when they rotate out of the country. The war has also substantially increased the military's overall recruiting costs, reflected in bigger bonuses and additional recruiters."

These factors, explain the estimate published in a study by left-leaning, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Blimes, indicate that the final costs of the Iraq war will be $1.27 trillion.

"The number is so high as to defy human comprehension," comments Yglesias. "A trillion is what you get if you spend a million dollars a day ... for a million days. That's 2,737 years"--a million dollars a day, every day, "until the Year of Our Lord 4743. Or, working backward, from the time when Homer wrote the Iliad up to now."