Here is an exceptional article from the Guardian Online:
The True Cost of War
The article is a review of the work of Joseph Stiglitz, a nobel prize winning economist who took a close look at the true cost of the war in Iraq.
Among his points:
- The true cost of the Iraq war, to the US economy alone, will be (conservatively) $3 trillion;
- $1 trillion dollars could pay for 15 million public school teachers; healthcare for 530 million children for a year; scholarships to university for 43 million students.
- The Iraq war has already cost more than 12 years of war in Vietnam;
- Constant obfuscation and untraceable accounting in the department of defense make it impossible to truly calculate the cost of the war;
- The war has created "self competition" for soliders - private security contractors (contracted to the US government) can make $400k/year in Iraq compared with $40k/year for soliders. Thus, competition for soldiers forces the government to pay signing bonuses to soldiers, increasing total costs;
- Sole-source bidding eliminates free market economics from driving down the cost of the war (i.e. Haliburton has received $19B in sole-source contracts);
- Since the Bush administration introduced tax cuts during the execution of the war, the government has had no choice but to borrow money to execute the war:
- Since the savings rate of the American people is so low, financing for the war has had to come from foreign sources (i.e. China);
- Borrowing the money to fund the war will cost another trillion dollars by 2017;
- Since so much money was being borrowed by the US government, the Federal Reserve purposefully kept the interest rate low, thus causing the housing market boom and eventual crash.
- The increase in the price of oil has been mostly caused by the Iraq war.
- The increase in oil caused a drop in GDP for the US, which led the US to increase interest rates, and thus cause the housing crash;
- The increase in the price of oil has had such an effect on developing African economies such that the increased economic cost has wiped out any gains coming from aid from first world economies.
- Finally, there's the cost of "lost opportunity" - the cost of losing the war in Afghanistan, the cost of not being able to engage North Korea (who really did have WMDs), the cost of not being able to address health care issues in the states, etc.
