The unimaginable cost of the Iraq war

As activists gear up to protest the third anniversary of the Iraq war, the cost of that war—in money spent, wounds sustained and lives lost—continues to grow.

A report released by 2001 Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes has now set the war’s monetary cost to the United States at between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. This up to 10 times more than previously estimated.

Stiglitz stressed to the Guardian that the report’s estimates are actually conservative, and do not include costs to Iraq or Britain. The study included costs of war not usually factored into estimates, such as health care. Lifetime care just for troops who have received brain injuries could cost up to $35 billion, the report says.

One reason for the war’s excessively high cost is “a singular legacy of the war in Iraq”—the highest level of injuries ever recorded in a war. (New York Times, Jan. 22)

Writer Denise Grady explains: “Survi vors are coming home with grave injuries, often from roadside bombs, that will transform their lives: combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress... . More than 1,700 of those wounded in Iraq are known to have brain injuries, half of which are severe enough that they may permanently impair thinking, memory, mood, behavior and the ability to work.”

The Army has had to open a new amputation center in response to the high number of amputations—345 as of Jan. 3, according to the article.

The military has tried to avoid the growing number of casualties and injuries by increasing its fighting from the air rather than the ground. However, even this strategy is having only limited success.

Defense News has reported that Iraqi resistance fighters “in the use of sophisticated, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles pose a grave new threat to American helicopters, U.S. Intelligence sources say.”

According to the newspaper, military sources previously thought that the missiles, SA-7s, had “all but disappeared as a threat in central Iraq.” Yet ABC News reports that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of unaccounted-for SA-7s throughout Iraq.

At least four helicopters have gone down in Iraq within the past two weeks. This brings the total of downed U.S. helicopters since May 2003 to 46, according to the Washington-based Brookings Institution. The U.S. military claims that only 26 of those were brought down by enemy fire.

at the same time, a recent Al Jazeera article headlined “Epide miology of mad war” describes the consequences of modern warfare: As military strategists devise new armor and tactics to protect their forces from the effects of weapons, civilians bear the brunt of the war.

Nicholas J.S. Davies writes: “Those who fire the most destructive weapons are now well protected from their effects, including the psychological effects of seeing what they do to other human beings. ... The inevitable consequence is that about 90 percent of the casualties in modern wars are civilians, not combatants.”

In a 2004 report the Lancet, the official journal of the British Medical Association, set the number of civilian deaths in Iraq about 100,000—with violence a leading cause of death, and air strikes by occupation forces the leading cause of those violent deaths. Now Davies updates the 2004 report, estimating between 200,000 and 700,000 Iraqi civilian deaths.

He points out that U.S. forces have ad mitted to conducting about 270 air strikes in November and December 2005. This compares with 200 total in the eight months between January and August of 2005.