One of the most amazing and important books ever written is "The Three Trillion Dollar War," by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize- winning economist at Columbia University, who was chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, senior-vice president and chief economist at the World Bank, and Linda J. Bilmes, an economist at Harvard University, who is an expert in government finance. She is a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Below are randomly scattered quotes from the book:

  • "There is controversty regarding the exact number of violent Iraqi deaths to date, variously estimated from 100,000 to more than 150,000, combined with higher rates of death from other causes, "excess" deaths may number 700,000 or more. The higher figures are bsed on standard statistical techniques."


  • "The middle class, so essential to functioning of a democratic society, has been destroyed -- a point made forcefully even by the man America chose to be the country's first post-occupation prime minister, Ayd Allawi. Some 2 million Iraqi refugess are scattered throughout the world. There are in addition to some 2 million Iraqis who have been uprooted within their own country. Most of those fleeing have gone to Jordon and Syria, but somewhat more than 26,000 Iraqis have come to Sweden seeking asylum or family reunification through 2006, with another 20,000 expected in 2007. ..."


  • "By now it is clear that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake. Nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have been killed, and more than 58,000 have been wounded, injured, or fallen seriously ill. A further 7,400 troops have been wounded or injured or fallen seriously ill in Afghanistan."


  • "One hundred thousand U.S.
    Resources Mis-directed

    What if the enormous human and financial resources spent on the war in Iraq had been invested instead on breaking petroleum dependency by transitioning to public transportation and electrical systems powered solely by renewable energy?

    Even if oil-producing countries are occupied, the oil is still going to run out.
    soldiers have returned from the war suffering from serious mental health disorders, a significant fraction of which will be chronic afflictions."


  • "Miserable though Saddam Hussein's regime was, life is actually worse for the Iraqi people now. The country's roads, schools, hospitals, homes, and museums have been destroyed and its citizens have less access to electricity and water than before the war.


  • "Sectarian violence is rife. Iraq's chaos has made the country a magnet for terrorists of all stripes. The notion that invading Iraq would bring democracy and catalyze change in the Middle East now seems like a fantasy."


  • "When the full price of the war has been paid, trillions of dollars will have been added to our national debt. Invading Iraq has also driven up oil prices. In these and other ways, the war has weakened our economy."


  • "...The war has turned out to be hugely costly in both blood and treasure. We estimate that the total budgetary and economic cost to the United States will turn out to be around $3 trillion, with the cost to the rest of the world perhaps doubling that number again."


  • "In one sense, this book is about that $3 trillion -- how America will be paying the bill for this war for decades to come, and why it is that the true costs are so much larger than the cost estimates originally provided by the Bush administration. But the book is also about much more than a single number. By examining the costs, we come to understand better the better the implications of the war, and perhaps learn how we can extricate ourselves from Iraq with the least amount of damage."


  • "...To arrive at the $3 trillion figure, we had to look beyond the government's bad budgeting and misleading accounting. It may sound strange to say it, but going to war is a big business. No modern firm would attempt to run its business without timely, accurate information provided by good accounting systems. Yet the accounting practices used by the government are so shoddy that they would land any public firm before the Securities and Exchange Commission for engaging in deceptive practices."


  • "At the beginning of the second Bush administration, the president talked about the seriousness of the country's Social Security crisis. But instead of paying for the war in Iraq, we could have fixed the Social Security problem for the next half century."


  • "These costs are certain to be huge and will continue for generations. That is the lesson of the 1991 Gulf War, a conflict that lasted for less than two months, with little ground fighting and 694,550 troops deployed to the Gulf. One hundred forty-eight U.S. soldiers were killed, and 467 injured in direct combat. America's allies (primarily Saudi Arabia and Kwait) paid for most of the combat operations of the first Gulf War. If you stop counting there, it seems the Gulf War was almost free. But that fails to take into account the large number of veterans suffering from some form of disability from the war, so that today -- more than sixteen years later -- the United States still spends over $4.3 billion each year paying compensation, pension, and disability benefits to more than 200,000 veterans of the GulfWar. We have already spent over $50 billion in Gulf War disability benefits. Even that number does not include the costs of ongoing veterans' medical care, of keeping U.S. forces stationed in Kuwait, of medical research into "GulfWar syndrome" illnesses, and of all the government workers necessay to tun these programs. Nor does it even scratch the surface of the broader economic consequences, for instance, from the loss of income for up to 100,000 soldiers exposed to chemicals associated with so-called GulfWar syndrome, 40,00 of whom have long-term disabilities."




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