The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict by Linda J. Bilmes (PDF)

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The true cost of the Iraq War is $3 trillion―and counting―rather than the $50 billion projected by the White House. Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. This sobering study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes casts a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans―for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer’s money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy. Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the war.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Readers may be surprised to learn just how difficult it was for Nobel Prize-winning economist Stiglitz and Kennedy School of Government professor Bilmes to dig up the actual and projected costs of the Iraq War for this thorough piece of accounting. Using “emergency” funds to pay for most of the war, the authors show that the White House has kept even Congress and the Comptroller General from getting a clear idea on the war’s true costs. Other expenses are simply overlooked, one of the largest of which is the $600 billion going toward current and future health care for veterans. These numbers reveal stark truths: improvements in battlefield medicine have prevented many deaths, but seven soldiers are injured for every one that dies (in WWII, this ratio was 1.6 to one). Figuring in macroeconomic costs and interest-the war has been funded with much borrowed money-the cost rises to $4.5 trillion; add Afghanistan, and the bill tops $7 trillion. This shocking expose, capped with 18 proposals for reform, is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how the war was financed, as well as what it means for troops on the ground and the nation’s future. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Linda J. Bilmes, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, is an expert in government finance. She is a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce.Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize–winning economist and the best-selling author of Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti- Globalization in the Age of Trump, The Price of Inequality, and Freefall. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton, chief economist of the World Bank, named by Time as one of the 100 most influential individuals in the world, and now teaches at Columbia University and is chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐There should be a genre known as political thriller or economics thriller. If there were such categories, “The Three Trillion Dollar War” would be in one of them.The authors make their bias known at the start of the book. They believe that going to war in Iraq was wrong. They give reasons for their position with each chapter of the book outlining the costs of the war in many ways the reader might not even thought of. In order to neutralize their bias, they also present the figures and conclusions in two ways: a best-case scenario, and a rational-realistic one. The former is to err on the side of a conservative supporting view of the war, and the latter is to project what they believe are the true costs of war.Those costs are measured on the nation’s budget, the cost of caring for our veterans, and the costs of war that the government doesn’t pay. These topics alone don’t sound like political or economic thrillers. While there was a great deal of interesting observations in these chapters, the authors’ frequent analyses and charts gave the book a sobering, academic tone.The last three chapters had me with my highlighter at the ready: the macroeconomic effect of the conflicts, the global consequences, exiting Iraq, and learning from our mistakes got my heart pounding as if it was a Stephen King novel. One question kept coming to mind as I turned each page: why didn’t the Bush administration anticipate any of these problems? From my almost daily obsession with the war, it was clear that the issues raised here were never a consideration.Authors, Stiglitz and Bilmes make the case that war has a multiplier effect. The true costs are not just what it costs to maintain war. It will cost us in the trillions (hence the title) to care for our veterans for years to come, and the cost of their value to society that we will never realize because they are buried. The military will have a multiplier effect, because they will not only have to sustain their budget, but replace it to prewar levels, not to mention rebuilding reserve and guard units. What the government will not provide for will be the burden of the wife, husband, father, mother, brother or sister who require around the clock care that government will not pay for, or will take way too long in processing the claim, and offer way too little if it approves. This is more productivity lost.What is equally stunning is the trust and popularity that nations once had for the United States has plummeted, even in nations that are our traditional allies, or nations whose cooperation we paid for to join the Coalition of the Willing. Some of these nations rank the U.S. as a greater threat than they do North Korea. This is especially true of Iraqis who saw our troops immediately protect the oil ministry while 6,000 years of antiquities were looted. Faced with the choice of fighting for an occupier or an insurgency, the choice is easy. The U.S. failed to provide law and order, or revive the economy, or end unemployment. We tortured innocent Iraqis as well as insurgents. Why not fight for an insurgency that will torture you only if you fight the occupier?Stiglitz and Bilmes show us clearly how the cost of this war will continue for decades. 1993 marked the highest expenditure of medical treatment for World War II veterans. We are currently paying 52 billion a year in compensation for those disabled or injured from the first Gulf War where the deaths were approximately 147 troops. With seven injuries for every combat death, a survival rate far higher than Korea or even Vietnam, think of how much and how long we will be paying for a war in which we have almost 5,000 dead and thousands more with severe injuries such as brain damage and loss of limbs.It is clear that the Congress failed to provide the proper checks and balances on a president determined to go to war. The president also bypassed the budgetary process and hid the true cost of war by getting more money through supplemental budgets that are not scrutinized. Our Defense Department keeps its books on a “cash accounting” basis rather than an accrual one which only covers current costs, not the cost of replacements that will be necessary.This book easily makes one of my all-time best books for political or economic thoroughness. Why? Because it makes you realize that the true cost of war is not a cost in just the present. It is a morass that continues to strap the strength and energy of a nation. This book makes me realize what I learned a long time ago about Vietnam, a lesson learned and a lesson forgotten in just a little over three decades.This book provides a lesson that is too important to be ignored–again.Also Recommended:

⭐This book is enough to make an anarchist out of anyone who reads it. I won’t review the contents (admirably done elsewhere by reviewer Steele), but if anyone doesn’t believe a Nobel Prize winning economist from Harvard and his associate, also from Harvard, then there is no one left to tell us the true story. According to the authors, the government is certainly not going to tell the complete, true story about Iraq.How our government in a representative democracy could have gotten us into the situation in Iraq boggles the mind. As Stiglitz and Bielmes point out repeatedly, our involvement was/is a combination of lies, stupidity, poor planning, “big ideas” (transform the Middle East!), cronyism, arrogance and the influence of a foreign country, Israel (if you doubt this, see THE ISRAEL LOBBY, Mearsheimer and Walt, pp. 229-262).And what have we gotten out of it? 4000+ dead, tens of thousands wounded, gas approaching $4.00 a gallon (the war was about oil, right?), the hatred and contempt of the rest of the world (“hypocrites,” they rightly call us), a worn-out army, and, very important to these economists, a debt of borrowed money that will take years and decades to pay back.As the authors point out, what could we have done with that money to make our own counry better! And the tens of thousands of talented men and women who, if not dead, will suffer the effects of this war for the rest of their lives. . ..So, what have we gotten out of our involvement in Iraq? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Less than nothing. We even have a Presidential candidate stupid enough to claim that we should stay there for years. And a government that we elected to look after our interests got us into this.

⭐I generally have a hard time dealing with writing that deals with accounting. I was not a business major, and it is hard for me to follow some of the monetary flows. It was startling to me when I discovered that this book was very easy to follow and was written for the average person. It is well written, with wonderful documentation and an easy to read and follow style.The numbers presented are mind boggling and numbing. How do you account for such huge numbers, and why haven’t we known before that the numbers were this big? The answer lies, primarily, in accounting tricks used by the government to hide certain expenses of to put them off onto other budgets so that the true cost could never be accurately accounted for. It’s quite a statement that the DOD flunked its last 7 audits; a trick that would send private company executives to prison.If you really want to know what the war will cost, where each of those costs is hidden and what those costs consist of, then this book is well worth the money. Every American should read this book now, before the election, to truly understand how we have been hoodwinked.

⭐We all know that entry into the Iraq war was based on false notions about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. What is less likely, is whether we remember what we were told it would cost: Less than $50 billion – will take only area weeks – six months at the outside. A secretary of the treasury even lost his job because he said it might cost $200 billion. Oh if it were only true!This text documents the true cost. Aside from the direct expenses of $700 billion, and more than 4000 American live, wemust account for the tens of thousands wounded- their care and lost productivity.This text is filled with statistics. The argument is persuasive – even overwhelming in its detail. The text does not stray far fromeconomics to make tie argument, nor does it need to. The facts speak clearly and loudly.

⭐Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have being doing their sums with regard to the total cost of the War in Iraq to the United States. The result is an accessible and readable account which makes the sums straightforward and the reasons and assumptions they have used are made clear to the reader – indeed it is evident that their estimate is on the low side.Stiglitz, a writer I for one have a good deal of time for, is an economist whom some would understandably pigeon hole as a reformist and this comes across in his writings. I dont think he completely appreciates the level of mendacity and the aims of the conservative right with regard to government. They are not at all disturbed at the disarray of public finances in the U.S. and are quite happy to see goverment spending on social programs and business regulation cut to make payments on the immense public deficit they have bequeathed future citizens of the U.S.Saying that – he does pay some attention to the financial and human effects of the War with regards to Iraq, Britain and indeed the World in general. His appreciation of the size of the health problem that U.S. troops are incurring is deep and his castigating of the Bush administration record on this is suitably caustic.He also looks into the explosive growth of private contractors, the effect on cost of oil, the weak congressional oversight of the war and its costs and other related issues. I’d thoroughly reccomend it and other Stiglitz writings, he maybe a bit niave about the prospects for change but his writing is sharp and has a good deal of integrity.

⭐Good

⭐Excellent product. Very quick delivery – thank you very much…

⭐Reliable. Recommended.

⭐An authoritative account of the real cost

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