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• Related Materials

  • Trying to Make Sense of the Cost of War
    By Amity Shlaes, Senior Fellow for Economic History
    Op-Ed
    March 20, 2008

  • The Truth About Iraq's Casualty Count
    By Max Boot, Senior Fellow for National Security Studies
    Op-Ed
    May 3, 2008

  • Neoconner
    By Leslie H. Gelb, President Emeritus and Board Senior Fellow
    Op-Ed
    April 27, 2008

  • The Price of the Surge
    By Steven Simon, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies
    Op-Ed
    April 16, 2008

  • Friend or Foe?
    By Ray Takeyh, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies
    Op-Ed
    April 15, 2008

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  Stiglitz the Nobelist Gets Math Wrong on Iraq War

  Author:	Amity Shlaes, Senior Fellow for Economic History

  March 5, 2008
  Bloomberg

  Three trillion dollars is the amount that Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz puts as the cost of the Iraq war. In a new book with Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Columbia University economist argues that the Bush administration has underestimated outlays for the war by hundreds of billions of dollars.

  “The Three Trillion Dollar War” offers a valuable reminder that wars usually cost more than budget figures suggest. Still, the profs are off the mark when it comes to their larger charge that this conflict is necessarily darkening the U.S.’s future.

  Stiglitz and Bilmes start with legitimate points. The first is that the administration hasn’t done a good job with numbers. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Larry Lindsey, then a top economic adviser to President George W. Bush, dared to hazard that the conflict might cost the egregious sum of $200 billion. Someone or other tried out $300 billion.

  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared soon after on television, dismissing numbers in that range as “baloney.” As the years passed, of course, it became clear that even the Lindsey estimate was far too low. Just last month, the Congressional Budget Office said the U.S. has already spent some $750 billion on Iraq, Afghanistanand the war on terror, with more to come.

  To arrive at their $3 trillion, Stiglitz and Bilmes start with oil. They carefully note that a good share of the quadrupling of oil prices is a result of non-war reasons such as Chinese andU.S. demand.

  View full text of article

• 

  New CFR Books

  

  In The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, Noah Feldman tells the story behind the increasingly popular call for the establishment of the sharia—the law of the traditional Islamic state—in the modern Muslim world.

  

  In Regional Monetary Integration, Peter B. Kenen poses an important question: Should various country groups follow the lead of the European Monetary Union and form similar full-fledged monetary unions?

  

  Walter Russell Mead recounts the story of the centuries-long rivalry between the English- speaking peoples and their enemies in God and Gold.

  Complete list of CFR Books.

  

  

  New from the Council: Policy Options Papers

  Kenya

  In this POP, Adjunct Fellow Michelle D. Gavin suggests steps the Bush administration could take to promote political and ethnic reconciliation and to restore the viability of Kenya’s governing institutions.

  Pakistan

  In this paper, Senior Fellow Daniel Markey poses a set of recommendations for the United States to consider in response to Pakistan’s ongoing political crisis.

  

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