The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict

click here for more details, find new or used items	Joseph Stiglitz, Linda Bilmes Our price £14.00 (£20.00) New from £9.80 Used from £9.94 Pages: 336 (Hardcover) ISBN: 1846141281 Pub: Allen Lane Pub date: 2008-02-28 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 10225

Reader Reviews:

Scary numbers of war (3/3 people found this helpful)

For me this book (which I've just finished) has given me 3 insights:

1) Geez, war really does cost a lot. I can't see how any politician in his / her right mind would ever commit their country to such an economy-destroyer. The US and UK are shown to have cunningly tried to both disregard and hide the costs of invading Iraq, and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan, to a shockingly immoral and callous extent. You won't be surprised to know the Iraqis haven't exactly done well out of the war either. Unless you're a defence contractor, war just isn't worth it.

2) Politicians will go to extreme lengths for their own short term gain, at almost any cost. It really is depressing, reading that the US army employs so many contractors to keep the army fatality numbers lower, but at such a cost that they don't give their own troops proper equipment or reasonable medical care after injury or PTSD. That's material cost. The authors also include goodwill towards America and Britain - this book is very well thought out.

3) Politicians again I'm afraid: The Bush administration has managed to hump much of the costs onto the next generations in the form of interest payments, without anyone (apart from the authors) really noticing. This is really quite serious and I winced as I read what services might have to be cut so that this war can be paid off.


The facts and figures are presented clearly and give no doubt that the proper research and reasonable methods / assumptions have been made by the authors, who I must thank for this book. I can't think of any adult who shouldn't read this. The headline figures are very interesting but the book provides more than that; it gave me an education into the non-military effects of war, and how devastating they invariably are.

Useful estimates of the costs of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan (5/7 people found this helpful)

Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, and Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard, have produced an estimate of the real cost of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Iraq, 4,000 US troops have been killed, 58,000 wounded, and 100,000 have returned home with serious mental disorders. Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate that the USA's total lifetime medical, disability and social security costs for the two wars will be $717 billion through to 2017.

They estimate that the war against Iraq will cost the USA a total of $2.65 trillion through to 2017. The war on Afghanistan will cost another $850 billion through to 2017. The total is $3.5 trillion. (Bush misunderestimated it would be $50 billion, wrong by a factor of seventy.) This works out at $25,000 for every US household.

The costs of the two wars to the rest of the world are another $3 trillion, largely because the invasion has driven up oil prices from $25 a barrel to $120. This has cost the world $800 billion so far, and will have cost an estimated $1.6 trillion by 2015. It has cost us in Britain £24 billion so far, and will have cost an estimated £50 billion by 2015.

The wars' direct military costs to us in Britain so far are £8.7 billion; the estimated future costs till 2015 are another £7 billion. Veterans' disability and medical costs are £2.3 billion. The social costs of deaths and disabilities are another £2 billion. The total is £20 billion, £800 per household.

The First World War cost the USA $577 billion, the war on Korea $295 billion, the war on Vietnam $670 billion and the Gulf War $94 billion. The total cost of these four wars was $1.64 trillion, which is just half the cost of the two current wars.

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