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| U.S. soldiers guard a burning oil well in the Rumalia oil field a few weeks after the invasion. |
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| (costofwar.org) Brown University's report estimates the war's death toll. |
The Pentagon was allocated $1.4 trillion dollars for the War on Terror from 2003-2011. However, much of the economic price tag is made up of opportunity costs. Brown University estimates that 8.3 jobs are created for every $1 million in military spending. However, the military sector is not the most efficient for job-creation. The study states: "A million dollars of spending would create 15.5 jobs in public education, 14.3 jobs in healthcare, 12 jobs in home weatherization, or about the same number of jobs in various renewable energy technologies. A million dollars spent on construction (residential and non-residential structures) creates 11.1 direct and indirect jobs." Thus, military spending on the war could have created hundreds of thousands of more jobs each year if it had been invested in a different sector.
Other major costs incurred do to the war include the $455 billion expansion of homeland security costs, $259 billion in interest on borrowed money to fund the war (with an additional $1 trillion estimated by 2023), and $754 billion to be spent on veterans over the next 30-40 years. Economists have estimated the total cost of the war for the U.S. economy to be somewhere in between $3 trillion and $6 trillion.
So could we have avoided these gargantuan costs or where they absolute necessities? Brown University's report cites "intelligence and policing methods" and "peaceful political accommodation" as the most effective responses to terrorist organizations as evinced through the study of 268 terrorist groups from 1968 to 2006.
For additional readings and reflections on the war, I'd recommend checking out CNN's coverage, a Washington Post article that attempts to debunk several myths about the war, and different opinions presented by the New York Times. I found that each of these presentations were highly informative and worth reading first-hand.
What are your thoughts on the war and its costs? The Iraq War has been a tremendously influential part of our childhoods, and I'm sure many here have personal opinions on the war. Feel free to respond directly to something brought up in this post or to take a step back and examine the war from your own perspective.
In short: The Iraq War cost the world at least 330,000 lives directly from violence and trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy. Looking back 10 years later, what can we make of this war?
3 comments:
Did the Iraq war have a favorable outcome? Yes, it did, because right now Iraq has a functioning, albeit tenuous, democracy. Was it worth it? That's a harder question. We went in for all the wrong reasons--WMDs, spreading democracy, whatever you'd like--but in the end the country stabilized to some degree.
People often fixate on the cost of the war, the $1.4 trillion, instead of the body count. Yeah, America lost somewhere around 4,000 soldiers with tens of thousands of casualties, but the numbers of dead Iraqis, mostly civilians, far outweigh our body count. That was one of the larger mistakes of the war. If Iraq and the rest of the Middle East resent America's presence, it's not because we reformed a government, it's because it took so long and we did it so poorly.
Ten years later, the war is already fading into memory. We spent the money and we can't get it back, so focusing on that is useless. We learned, though, that turning a dictatorship into a functioning democracy is possible. With that experience, and the experiences of fighting militants, I think the United States is capable of doing the process faster and more effectively than before. Hopefully, though, we won't make the mistake of trying to do it alone.
I agree with James that the process of "spreading democracy," "find weapon of mass destruction," and other parts of the Iraq War was not effectively executed. It is difficult to say that it was worth all the pain and money in regards to all the casualties as a result of the war. In addition, the current Iraqi government could hardly be called a "democracy" however hard the western world tries to perceive it as one.
Back to the economy aspect of this post, I think that i heard from time to time that the US went into Iraq not for "spreading democracy" or taking out "weapon of mass destruction" but for the oil. If oil was indeed the true motivation for the US government at the time to launch this controversial conflict, the effort put into the war all along the way, then, should be considered fruitful. After all a regime far more friendly to the US is now in place, to some degree guaranteeing the stable export of some of the material that is vital to the US economy. And as the US troop is pulling out, major western oil companies such as Shell, Exonn, BP...etc. stay in Iraq.
Iraq's oil reserve stands second in the world, only behind Saudi Arabia. From a purely economics point of view, yes, the US could have used the money it spent in Iraq somewhere else, but how does it compare to the benefit it gains in terms of oil? Was it worth it or no?
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/12/2011122813134071641.html
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