Study: Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives

[unhappycamper]

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/03/14/1721961/study-iraq-war-cost-2-triillion/?mobile=nc



Study: Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives
By Ben Armbruster on Mar 14, 2013 at 2:56 pm

A new report by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that nearly 200,000 people, including soldiers and civilians, were killed in the war in Iraq President George W. Bush launched 10 years ago.

The report also found that American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.

~snip~

The Watson Institute project — which involves “30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations, and other organizations” — comes on the heals of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction’s final report released last week finding that the U.S. spent $60 billion on reconstruction efforts in Iraq and that $10 billion of it was wasted on fraud and abuse.

Reuters reported that Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, didn’t dispute the report’s findings but said the U.S.’s post-invasion battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group that did not exist prior to March 19, 2003 — made the war worth it.



unhappycamper comment: Paul Wolfowitz was correct about one thing:

I mean, we're going to probably debate the Iraq war for at least as long as I'm alive.

Paul Wolfowitz