The Guardian reported yesterday on Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes upcoming book, The Three Trillion Dollar War. In it, they attempt to audit the whole Iraq war effort. The article is terrifying; I thought I'd pull out some bullet points. The first one is obviously in the title - their estimate of the true cost - and this is just for the US (compared to an official estimate of £500 billion.) Other bullet points lifted from the article:

• The rest of the world, including Britain, will probably account for about the same amount again.
• America is spending $16bn a month on running costs alone (ie on top of the regular expenses of the Department of Defence) in Iraq and Afghanistan; that is the entire annual budget of the UN.
• 1 trillion dollars = any one of the following: 8 million housing units, 15 million public school teachers, healthcare for 530 million children for a year, scholarships to university for 43 million students (note: most of these would count as investment as well - you'd get a return on it. The opposite is true for war-spending.)
• America is currently spending $5bn a year in Africa, equivalent to 10 days fighting
• Wage for contractor working as a security guard: $400,000; US soldier: $40,000
• A soldier injured in the first month has to pay back their sign-up bonus
• Soldiers have to pay for a lot of their own equipment: if they lose their helmet (even through being blown up) they'll be billed
• It wasn't until 2006 that that the DOD agreed to replace Humvees with mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armoured vehicles
• Halliburton received at least $19.3bn in single-source contracts (i.e. bidding was limited... to Halliburton. Free market, huh?)
• Often, when contracts went to US firms rather than local ones, those firms would then bring in labour from e.g. Nepal because it was cheaper - even though one in two iraqi men were out of work
• The war has been paid for through borrowing (and taxes have been cut): the interest alone is 'a couple of hundred billion a year' - another trillion by 2017 and a little present for the next president
• Stiglitz also argues that the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low and 'looked the other way as lending standards were lowered' as a result of US government loan-seeking and pressure to keep their interest lower; he connects this to the subsequent sub-prime crisis
• Much of the war fund now comes from China; Stiglitz notes it was China that bailed out Merrill Lynch and Citibank recently because America simply doesn't have the money
• From studying futures markets, Stiglitz concludes that 'a significant proportion' of the rise in oil prices is due to instability post-Iraq; oil has gone up from $25 to $100 a barrell in five years
• Projecting to 2015, this will be an extra £1.6 trillion on oil in the US
• Direct quote: to developing countries it has been devastating - they note a study by the International Energy Agency that looked at a sample of 13 African countries and found that rising oil prices have "had the effect of lowering the average income by 3% - more than offsetting all of the increase in foreign aid that they had received in recent years, and setting the stage for another crisis in these countries"

In summary, they fucked things up right and proper. Stiglitz again: 'that's part of being in a global economy. You make a mistake of this order, and it affects people all over the world.' You'd really, really want to think a car-crash of this magnitude would require the incompetents and ideologues who led us there to be held accountable.