As critics of the U.S. efforts to bring some semblance of liberal democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly unable to credibly claim these endeavours will fail, they have predictably moved to focus on the costs.  It’s become popular to refer to the “Trillion Dollar War.”
In fact, from the very start this war cost $2 trillion or more.  That’s right, two-thirds of the cost of the GWOT was incurred on a single day while we were passively sitting on the defensive, before we sent any ground forces into combat in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Not fighting has its costs, too.
By factoring in effects like the price of oil and future payments and opportunity costs, some have pegged the cost of our offensives as high as $3 trillion. Of course, by these vague measures of long-term consequences, 9/11 probably cost us in excess of $9T, though it’s impossible to predict with any certainty what either will ultimately cost.
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That’s essentially been my response to those who trivialize what happened to us on 9/11. No, it didn’t take us out in a single stroke. Yes, we’re recovering.
But a 9/11 happening every 10 years would constitute an existential threat.
I love the ‘it will cost a trillion dollars’ theme.
President Bush’s ‘Return to Space’ initiative was widely blasted for costing ‘a trillion dollars (or more)’. An aerospace writer named Dwayne Day tracked this down to it’s source – an AP writer who, basically, made it up.
bdunbar’s last blog post..Semper Fi
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