<nettime> Iraq war price tag reaches three trillion US dollars: Joseph Stiglitz

[J Armitage <j.armitage@unn.ac.uk>]

Iraq war price tag reaches three trillion US dollars: book

http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Iraq_war_price_tag_reaches_three_trillio
n_US_dollars_book_999.html

SPACE WAR EXPRESS

The war in Iraq will cost US taxpayers at least three trillion
dollars, a respected, Nobel Prize-winning economist wrote in a new
book which was excerpted in the US press this week.

Joseph Stiglitz's book "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost
of the Iraq Conflict," concluded that US military operations in Iraq
already have exceeded the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is
more than double the cost of the Korean War.

"The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World
War, when 16.3 million US troops fought in a campaign lasting four
years, at a total cost (in 2007, inflation-adjusted dollars) of about
five trillion dollars," he wrote in the work co-authored with Harvard
professor Linda Bilmes.

"With virtually the entire armed forces committed to fighting the
Germans and Japanese, the cost per troop (in today's dollars) was less
than 100,000 dollars in 2007 dollars. By contrast, the Iraq war is
costing upward of 400,000 dollars per troop."

The Pentagon took exception to the figures -- and to the premise that
there have been undisclosed costs involved in financing the war.

"It seems like an exaggerated number to us," said Pentagon spokesman
Geoff Morrell.

"The Pentagon has been extraordinarily transparent about what we know
of the cost of the war

Stiglitz, was winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics and former
chief economist at the World Bank.

His co-author Bilmes is a professor of public finance at Harvard
University.

The book is published as the fifth year of the US-led conflict comes
to a close.

Film at eleven ...

John





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