I’m a bit late in commenting on this but, regardless of what your views on the American military presence in Iraq might be, I urge you to listen to the interview on NPR’s Fresh Air program with Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz about their book, The 3 Trillion Dollar War, on the real, astronomical costs of the war in Iraq. It makes for very sobering listening.
I have a few quibbles about what they’re considering as costs but I don’t want to go on at length about it. I think it would be interesting to do the same sort of cost accounting of World War II and other wars. Further, I think we have to remember that not invading Iraq would have had its costs, too. While I continue to think that we could have contained Saddam, I also think that what we were doing was failing and we would have needed to spend a great deal more money than we had as time wore on.
The one point I did want to make is that what too many are missing is that, for the most part, the costs that are being complained about are, for the most part, sunk costs. The time to think about them was in 2002 and I blame not just the Bush Administration but, primarily, both the Democrats and Republicans in the U. S. Senate. I’ve never found the “dog ate my homework” excuses of the Democrats who were sitting in the Senate in 1999 (the year regime change in Iraq become official U. S. policy) or 2002 (the year of the Authorization to Use Military Force) during the recent primaries in the least credible.
