The Three Trillion Dollar War

The Three Trillion Dollar War is a devastating reckoning of the true cost of the Iraq war – quite administration estimated at $ 50 billion, a sum that Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes now show underestimates the real figure by approximately sixty times. Here Stiglitz and Bilmes expose the gigantic expenses which have so far not been officially accounted for, including not only conventional items like replacing military equipment but also the staggering cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans – for the rest of their lives. The authors investigates the cost in lives and damage within Iraq and the Middle East generally, often written off as impossible to calculate; and they specifically tally the cost to the UK, the main US ally. They then calculate what the money spent on the war would have produced had it been further invested in the growth of the economy and in infrastructure building in the US and around the world.