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Democrats quickly point to the cost of the war in Iraq. At a cost of roughly $100B per year, they use it as an economic issue. What they don't consider is the cost of failure in Iraq, nor have they articulated a strategy that will both affored victory and still extricate us from Iraq. Let us consider a few scenarios in a post-withdrawal Iraq and calculate the costs involved. Should even moderate instability result from the U. S, departure from Iraq, the price of oil will be likely to rise. A rise in oil prices that would result in a...

Congress has appropriated $251bn for military operations, and the Congressional budget office has now estimated that under one plausible scenario the Iraq war will cost over $230bn more in the next 10 years. According to Nobel prize winner Mr Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Ms Bilmes, there are substantial future costs not included in the Congressional calculations. For instance, the latest Pentagon figures show that more than 16,000 military personnel have been wounded in Iraq. Due to improvements in body armour, there has been an unusually high number of soldiers who have survived major wounds such as brain damage, spinal...

My friends lib hubby (she's conservative) sent her a link to this site. Does anyone you there know where you can find dollar figures for this stuff? Is this website anywhere close to accurate? Thanks for any help - I plan to send her a link to this thread once a few responses are posted!

Next time a Dem tries to make political hay of the cost of the Iraq war, remember, "[T]he economic impact on the city from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center will cost as much as $95 billion and will reverberate for years to come..."

WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 — When lawmakers asked the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office to estimate the cost for a still undefined and undeclared war with Iraq, they got two vastly different scenarios. The estimated cost for a “heavy air war” with one month of combat, but no occupation force would cost about $21 billion. A “heavy ground war” with three months of combat, heavy ground troops and a five-year occupation force could total more than $272 billion. ACCORDING TO THE CBO, occupation costs alone might run as high as $4 billion per month. “If we’re going to be in there five...