The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, has issued a final report to Congress, and it concludes that we wasted our time and money in Iraq. It looks like we spent an average of about $80 billion a year in Iraq, but don’t forget about the cost of caring for all our veterans.
Overall, including all military and diplomatic costs and other aid, the U.S. has spent at least $767 billion since the American-led invasion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. National Priorities Project, a U.S. research group that analyzes federal data, estimated the cost at $811 billion, noting that some funds are still being spent on ongoing projects.
Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Senate committee that oversees U.S. funding, said the Bush administration should have agreed to give the reconstruction money to Iraq as a loan in 2003 instead as an outright gift.
You know, we might have made an entirely different case for taking out Saddam Hussein than we did. But we said that he had weapons of mass destruction and was about six seconds away from detonating a nuclear device in Times Square. So, when it turned out that our government was totally full of shit, we could have handed Saddam a check for $767 billion, or $811 billion, and just said “bygones.” That wouldn’t have been politically popular or even particularly smart from an imperial point of view, but it actually would have wound up being cheaper and it would have saved the lives of thousands of Americans who died for no good reason, and possibly tens of thousands of Iraqis who also died for no good reason. Saddam certainly did not deserve the money, but it wouldn’t have been any stupider than invading his country in the first place, or staying there for almost a decade presiding over one of the worst examples of graft ever produced in world history.
Or, you know, we could have followed Susan Collins’ advice and put everything on the Iraqi credit card.
