Iraq and Afghanistan to Cost US $2.4 Trillion

Wow, was I ever wrong! Back in early 2003 when I was with Jane’s Defence Weekly, I estimated that the cost of a war with Iraq would cost $200 billion-$220 billion over five years. At the time the Bush administration was saying it would cost $50 billion in total. I got a lot of grief from some Bush apparatchiks for my estimate. Turns out I low-balled the number by quite a bit. So far Afghanistan and Iraq have cost $604 billion and the non-partisan US Congressional Budget Office estimates that the total cost through 2017 to be $2.4 trillion. So the Bush administration’s initial estimate was off by a factor of 48. That's right, the Bushies' war cost estimate was 2.1% of the real estimated cost.

For that same amount of money we could have put a colony on Mars! Not only would that have had the effect of unifying people with a new frontier, but the spin-off technologies would have probably led to whole new industries and an economic boom.

The downside would have been that Halliburton wouldn’t have gone from being the number 17^th largest contractor to the US Department of Defense to the 7^th and Cheney’s stock options wouldn’t be worth as much.