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

Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes cast a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans--for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer's money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy.--From amazon.com.

User reviews

LibraryThing member jcbrunner

War is a costly and destructive activity not to be undertaken frivolously and unprepared. Alas, the Bush administration, cheered on by the media and a vengeful public, marched to war. The list of what the US could have paid for with the money it wasted on war is heartbreaking. The gist of this book

has already been published in the authors' brave paper some years ago. This is basically an extended walk-through of all the assumptions the authors made to arrive at their number, a task quite unnecessary as the political attacks upon the paper relied upon bad faith and willful ignorance, Just one assumption I find a hard-nosed economist would not agree on: To value an Iraqi life as much as an American one. They should have based the Iraqi lifetime value on Iraq's economic potential.

The book then turns to the bad treatment of US Veterans who receive but stingy treatment for their sacrifice. While the accusations are shameful, this is not a novel element of the Iraqi War. From Washington's Valley Forge on, the US has treated its soldiers badly. The Civil War slogan "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight" is still pertinent. While the US is very vocal in honoring their soldiers, actual care lags far behind. As the US upper class does not seek military careers, the army recruits among the less fortunate. Service for the poor rapidly become poor services. The Bush administration's penchant for corruption only aggravates an existing problem.

Overall, the two messages, that wars are expensive and soldiers deserve proper care, are important and should be given more consideration. I am not sure if their combination in one book is a good choice, as it mixes strategic decisions about politics and wars with instrumental ones. This lessens the impact of the book.

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LibraryThing member nmele

The buzz about this book has focused on the authors' estimate of the true costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the bulk of the book is a discussion of those costs, but the final chapter is a set of recommended reforms that ought to be read by every citizen of the U.S. And then we all

ought to write every Senator and Representative up for reelection in November and tell them that we will vote them out of office unless they pass these reforms.

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