Cost of the War vs. Reality

Lawrence B. Lindsey was Director of the National Economic Council in the 2001 to 2002 period. He was removed from his position for estimating publicly, even before the commencement of armed conflict in 2003, that the Iraq war adventure would cost what was then viewed as the astronomical figure of $200 BILLION. As is often the case in Washington, inconvenient truths and reality are quite unpopular.

In a display of the remarkable quality of their judgement, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Office of Management and Budget Director Mitchell E. Daniels estimated that the still unfolding regime change/nation building experiment in Iraq would cost between $50 and $60 billion. Serious questions concerning these fanciful estimates were not asked of these officials by the Bush administration's Republican and Democratic Party allies in the United States Congress. (Governor Daniels' term of office ends in 2009.)

Today, as many know, the cost of the war is calculated at $465+ BILLION at a rate of increase of over $1,000 per SECOND.

In 2006, Nobel laureate and Columbia professor of economics Joseph Stiglitz estimated that the total cost of this mismanaged and misbegotten adventure would attain a level of $1.2 to $2 TRILLION. Recently, the Financial Times reported U.S. Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost could reach $2.4 TRILLION (£1.175 trillion, €1.7 trillion) over the next decade, with interest payments on the borrowed sums involved in financing this experiment featuring prominently in the calculus.

The wisdom of this arrangement of priorities in the use of taxpayer dollars is a matter of considerable interest to both Republican and Democratic Party presidential and congressional candidates in the coming 2008 presidential election. It was President Ronald Reagan who rose to fame on the issue of waste of taxpayer dollars.

Thankfully, both former Massachusetts Governor Willard Mitt Romney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani are already developing themes about wasteful government spending in their campaigning. On the Republican side, Rudy Giuliani has shown the most effective leadership in cutting wasteful government spending, which is one of the many reasons he enjoys AR's support for the Republican nomination. In 2008 the public will be looking closely at the return on investment on this substantial expenditure of resources.

Nonetheless, so far, it does not appear that Senator Cornyn and Senator McConnell have repudiated the errors in judgement which led so many in Washington to embrace the world of fantasy economics that gave birth to the Rumsfeld/Daniels methodology for assessing the costs and spending the nation's scarce resources in this adventure. Indeed, both of these leading senators have remained loyally wedded to staying the course of ruin.