The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
By Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes
Published by Allen Lane, 2008

My review for Daily Xpress, published on June 8.

A curious egg in the much-scoured nest of anti-war journalism, “The Three Trillion Dollar War” is a well-intended study that grew into a 300-page hardcover book, bulked up even further by the use of airy, large-font text.

Former World Bank chief economist Stiglitz is generous with his syndicated newspaper columns, so it’s strange that this expanded column should become such a hefty weight for the home library shelf. The content, while solidly researched and compellingly presented, doesn’t justify the scale.

There are eight chapters, half of them a monetary accounting of America’s effort to secure itself a Middle Eastern oil supply by re-imposing Western authority in Iraq. The figures, when you tally up military hardware and personnel, rebuilding the infrastructure, maintaining the oil supply and especially caring for the armed-forces veterans into their old age, does indeed reach $3 trillion — easily.

While acknowledging their anti-war bias, the authors insist they have nevertheless been “excessively conservative”.

“At the beginning of the second Bush administration, the president talked about the seriousness of the [US] Social Security crisis,” they note. “But instead of paying for the war in Iraq, we could have fixed the Social Security situation for the next half century.”

The rest of the book is about the Iraq conflict’s ramifications at home and around the world and, finally, how the United States can get out of the mess if it overcomes its “departure delusions”, and the lessons that can be learned from it all, including a list of suggested legislative reforms.

TEXT BITE: There should be a presumption that the costs of any conflict lasting more than one year should be borne by current taxpayers, through the levying of a war surtax. War has become too easy for America.