The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict

Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. This sobering study casts a spotlight on expenses that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer and measures what this money would have produced if it had been invested in the economy.

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.