All that for only a trillion dollars....

By Fester: 950 billion dollars is about where we are starting to talk about real money. It is enough to pay for one financial sector bail-out, guarantee most of one government sponsored enterprise, repay most of the Federal Reserve's expanded balance sheet, or pay for one strategically counterproductive war and another war whose supporters argue for a century of committment before we 'win'.

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has added up the appropriated costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to date and for the next couple of fiscal years and they come up to slightly less than a trillion dollars:

Since 2001, the US government and the American taxpayer have provided about $904 billion (unless otherwise noted, all cost and funding figures cited in this analysis are expressed in 2008 dollars) for military operations, including $66 billion to cover war-related costs for the first part of 2009. (p. 9 and i of the Exec. Sum.)

scenarios developed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) suggest that the direct budgetary costs of these military operations could amount to an additional $416–817 billion through 2018—assuming the number of US troops involved in the two conflicts is reduced from today’s level of about 200,000 to some 30,000–75,000 over the next several years. This would bring the direct budgetary costs of these wars to a total of some $1.3–1.7 trillion (p. 10 and ii of Exec. Sum.)

They take a fairly conservative approach to their accounting and just look at appropriations for their cost estimates. They acknowledge that other estimates of far greater macro-economic impact such as the Stiglitz estimate of a 2 trillion dollar total appropriated and social cost estimate but the CSBA does not want to wade into that methodological pie fight (I can understand their reasoning) so they go with the most solid and the lowest cost estimates that are defensible.

So for most of a trillion dollars, we set-up and support a pro-Iranian government, created hundreds of warlords who usefully protect our logistics, killed, wounded or displaced twenty percent of the country's pre-war population and destabilized most social, economic and political networks within Iraq. And the Iraqis are not grateful. How shocking and we only did this for most of a trillion dollars.