Iraq war ends with a $4 trillion IOU
Veterans’ health care costs to rise sharply over the next 40 years
The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion, over a 50-year period, that comes to $80 billion annually.
My Children's Children get to pay for this failure. And too many people here are itching to borrow money form China to keep the failed foreign policy alive!
I was using like-for-like comparisons - costs incurred during previous wars compared to costs incurred during Iraqi Freedom. If we run through the numbers the way you're proposing, we could equally run up the follow-on costs of previous wars and come to roughly comparable numbers. Iraq Freedom cost roughly 6% of GDP. WWII cost 200% of GDP. Vietnam cost 13% of GDP. And so on.
Could we have avoided fighting Germany after Pearl Harbor and skipped the 300,000 dead and 150% of GDP we lost in North Africa and Europe? Absolutely. We could even have given up Hawaii, which is pretty much useless for anything apart from planting tropical fruit, and left Asia to the Japanese empire, while skipping the 100,000 dead and 50% of GDP we lost fighting in Asia. Would the abandonment of territories outside of the continental US have been the right thing to do? A lot of people will disagree with you on this...
I submit that the war isn’t costing that 4 trillion, it is the policy to borrow money-
Of course you have to ask what would have happened if Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti had been able to reconstitute his WMD programs. The UN sanctions had broken down. He was not following the armistice. He was more than willing to use WMD on his own people, and probably would have been willing to use them on us.