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The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict Paperback – September 17, 2008
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A New York Times Bestseller "This is a catalog [of costs] the Bush team never looked at. It's a catalog that they still don't want you to see."―James Galbraith
America has already spent close to a trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are hundreds of billions of bills still due―including staggering costs to take care of the thousands of injured veterans, providing them with disability benefits and health care. In this sobering study, Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard University's Linda J. Bilmes reveal a wide range of costs that have been hidden from U.S. taxpayers and left out of the debate about our involvement in Iraq. That involvement, the authors conservatively estimate, will cost us more than $3 trillion.- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateSeptember 17, 2008
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-100393334171
- ISBN-13978-0393334173
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― Dave W. Gorman, executive director, Disabled American Veterans
About the Author
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize–winning economist and the best-selling author of People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent; 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.
Product details
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; 52788th edition (September 17, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0393334171
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393334173
- Item Weight : 0.037 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,943,790 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #804 in Iraq History (Books)
- #1,956 in Iraq War History (Books)
- #2,046 in Political Freedom (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the authors
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University and the recipient of a John Bates Clark Medal and a Nobel Prize. He is also the former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. His books include Globalization and Its Discontents, The Three Trillion Dollar War, and Making Globalization Work. He lives in New York City.
Professor Linda Bilmes is an expert on government budgeting and public finance, a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former Assistant Secretary and Chief Financial Officer of the US Department of Commerce. She has co-authored multiple books and book chapters and has written extensively on the cost of war, veterans’ issues, national parks, municipal budgeting and financial topics. Her research has been published in the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and other media. She serves on numerous boards including the US Department of Interior National Parks Advisory Committee and the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and holds a BA and MBA from Harvard University and a D.Phil from the University of Oxford.
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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:
The Arrogance of Power
THE IRAQ STUDY GROUP REPORT BY JAMES A. BAKER, III, AND LEE H. HAMILTON, CO-CHAIRS
The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity--and What We Can Do About It
Ten Trillion and Counting
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and StickYou with the Bill)
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (American Empire Project)
Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (American Empire Project)
The authors are economists, so the writing is a little dry. However, I can't see any liberal or conservative bias. Stiglitz and Bilmes definitely qualify as "good guys." Worth a read.
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.
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.
The authors estimates of costs are meticulous, well supported and extremely unsettling. They point out no serious economist still thinks wars are good for the economy and the facts point to this war being even less so because it's being fought on a credit card. The authors even get into the taxpayer fleecing condoned by the administrations active support of no bid contracts extended to a favored few.
A sobering read.
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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.