Always a thorn in Bush's side, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (along with colleague, Harvard professor Linda Bilmes) are about to publish their highly anticipated book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.
In an immense public service to Americans, the authors have uncovered the full extent of the discrepancies between what the Bush administration predicted (as well as what the Defense Department reports) the war in Iraq will cost Americans and the actual direct and indirect costs to date.
In addition, Stiglitz and Bilmes detail their struggle to obtain accurate information from the U.S. government, along with the overwhelming legacy of scandals they discovered along the way — from paying private contractors 10 times the salaries of army soldiers to do the exact same job, to revoking soldier bonuses if they are wounded in Iraq and can't complete their contracts. The authors estimate, among other things, that for a sixth of the cost of the war the Bush Administration could have placed the entire American Social Security system on sound financial ground for the next three quarters of a century, and for the cost of two weeks of war in Iraq, it could have eliminated illiteracy worldwide.
Stiglitz and Bilmes' comprehensive economic analysis of the war's costs — which doesn't even attempt to include the costs to Iraqis, to people elsewhere in the world, or to Americans from now until whenever the war is over — puts the total sum conservatively at $3 trillion.
Enjoy a preview.
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