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Tomgram: Mark Engler on the Real Costs of the War in Iraq

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse -- the al-Askariya shrine, the Golden Mosque of Samarra, one of Shia Islam's most revered sites, was invaded by gunmen in police uniforms (possibly from Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia group, though no one has yet taken responsibility), bombed, and thoroughly desecrated, as photos make shockingly clear. Shia across Iraq reacted in anger, in Najaf to chants of: "Rise up Shia! Take revenge! " At last report, in twenty-four hours at least 90 Sunni mosques -- the Muslim Scholars Association claims the number is already 168 -- were burned, desecrated, attacked, or taken over by armed Shia militiamen; three Sunni imams were killed and another kidnapped; possibly hundreds of ordinary Iraqis have died in all sorts of reprisal attacks and executions along with 26 year-old Atwar Bahjat, a well-known journalist, and two of her crew from al-Arabiya TV news. In Samarra, "shops closed and muezzins recited prayers from the loudspeakers of nearby mosques and blamed the United States for the turmoil, saying ‘God is Great, death to America which brought us terrorism.'"

The Americans, including our ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who tried to apply some American financial pressure to the Shiite coalition in the Green Zone earlier in the week, still fancy themselves part of the solution, not part of the problem in that chaotic, semi-occupied, increasingly fractious land. Now, they are forced to listen to claims that they were at least partially responsible for the latest horrific violence. More is still to come on what looks like a slippery slope toward a larger version of the quiet civil war that has been ongoing in Iraq.

This website has long attended to the "costs" of George Bush's decision to invade Iraq -- especially in human lives -- both to American troops sent into action there and to the Iraqis who have suffered grievously. Less attention has been paid here (and elsewhere) to the literal costs of the war, not just to who is being bled, but to what is being bled dry. Mark Engler, who has previously written on the business community and the war for Tomdispatch, now takes up the financial costs of war and pursues the subject vigorously.

While it is true that perhaps a million Americans turned out before the invasion of Iraq to protest the war to come, it is also a grim reality of our world that, had neocons dreams -- those flower-strewn paths and an eternal, placid occupation of Iraq -- actually come true, we would not today be speaking of the costs of war (no matter what they were to Iraqis). As in Vietnam, so here, those costs only really come into focus when the possibility of victory fades from sight. Engler makes good sense of the various escalating cost calculations so far offered on this war. No one, however, can make sense of the cost of what we are incapable of imagining or predicting (including the bombing of the Golden Mosque and everything that will flow from that act). My own guess is that, in the end, the cost of George's Bush's war of choice will prove incalculable in all sorts of frightening ways. Tom


How Costly Is Too Costly?
Finding the tipping point for Vietnam -- and for Iraq
By Mark Engler

In the center of the CostOfWar.com home page, an upward-racing ticker, presented in a large, red font, keeps a steady tally of the money spent for the U.S. war in Iraq. Every time I visit, it takes a moment to sort through the counter's decimal places and make sense of it. The hundreds of dollars fly by too quickly to track. The thousands change a little faster than once a second. As I write, the ticker reads $239,302,273,144.

It is worth staring at the site for a while to see the vast sums accumulate. Yet this exercise in wartime accounting quickly becomes unsatisfying. First of all, few Americans have any frame of reference for evaluating a number like $239 billion. The National Priorities Project, the organization hosting the counter, attempts to remedy this by allowing visitors to compare war costs with expenditures on pre-school, health care, and public housing, noting, for example, that this much money could provide basic immunizations for every child born worldwide in the next 79 years. Even then, the incomprehensibly large number ticking away on screen turns out to be no measure at all of what we will eventually pay for the war. Depending on what estimate you use, it could be off by almost a factor of ten. After all, it lacks a place for the trillions.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

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posted by Annamarie at 5:53 PM