Totting Up the Bill for the Iraq War

The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (W.W. Norton, 2008) is not just about money. The “true costs,” argue authors Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes (MBA ’84), are the lost opportunities that the United States could have pursued: expanding services for its own citizens, offering crucially needed leadership on the world stage, and improving domestic security.

The authors, who opposed the war from the start, begin by estimating the actual financial cost of operating the Afghanistan and Iraq wars at $2.7 trillion. (Before the wars, the Bush White House estimated the bill would be $50 billion.) Next comes a question: What could we have done with the money had we not gone to war? According to the National Priorities Project, a trillion dollars in spending could have begun significant repair of the Social Security system, or hired 15 million public school teachers, or built 8 million housing units, or underwritten 120 million children in Head Start, or offered some 40 million university scholarships.

A more difficult calculation follows. What are the hidden economic costs, such as future medical and psychological services for veterans? The number that Stiglitz, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Bilmes, a government finance expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School, arrive at is even more staggering: $5 trillion. They posit, for example, that the war, by creating uncertainty in oil futures markets, has added $35 per barrel to the price of oil, an assertion they made long before the recent run-up in oil prices.

Finances aside, the United States has lost something more: prestige and power. “In the long run, the squandering of America’s leadership role in the international community, and the diversion of attention from critical global issues — including issues like global warming . . . that won’t go away on their own and simply cannot wait to be addressed — may represent the largest and most long-standing legacy of this unfortunate war.”

The book closes as one would hope: with proposals for change. The eighteen measures include political and legal modifications to make war authorization more difficult, greater transparency on actual war spending, improved services for vets, and a “war tax” on individuals so that the war’s consequences are felt directly by citizens.

The White House has come down hard on the numbers and message of The Three Trillion Dollar War, but by offering a detailed, devastating accounting of the human, financial, political, and social costs of the war, this could be regarded as one of the best antiwar books ever written.

— Sean Silverthorne