Iraq: Lives, Time, And Money — How Much Did The Iraq War Cost America?

President Obama’s announcement Friday that the Iraq war is coming to an end, that U.S. troops will all be returning home by the end of the year certainly is great news. But how much did the Iraq War, started fraudulently by former President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, cost America in measurables — lives, time, and money?

And let’s remember that so much is not measurable. How many children’s birthdays, Christmases, recitals, school plays, and baseball games did American service members miss? How much money did spouses of our service members spend sending food and supplies to soldiers in Iraq? How much income was lost by members of the military because they gave up their jobs — or their lives — in service to their country? How many relationships or marriages ended because the cost of separation was too great?

These are but a few of the immeasurable questions we can ask of immeasurable costs of the war in Iraq. And that’s just Iraq. What about Afghanistan, and elsewhere?

“But while the return of all U.S. service men and women by Christmas is a cause for celebration, the costs of the war are only beginning to be fully understood,” writes Eli Clifton at Think Progress. “The ‘cakewalk’ to Baghdad, as George W. Bush adviser Kenneth Adelman infamously wrote in February, 2002, has been anything but. The Iraq War, and the faulty premise that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, has had a staggering humanitarian and economic cost.

Yesterday, Clifton pulled out a calculator and added up a few of the costs that are measurable. Here’s his report:

8 years, 260 days since Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program

8 years, 215 days since the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

103,142 – 112,708 documented civilian deaths

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$806 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011

$3 – $5 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

0 weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq

Thanks, President Bush.

(Image via Wikipedia: President George W. Bush addresses the nation from the Oval Office, March 19, 2003, to announce the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.” The Senate committee found that many of the administration’s pre-war statements about Iraqi WMD were not supported by the underlying intelligence.)