According to Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal, our attempt to make Iraq safe for democracy is going to cost $1 trillion, assuming troops are withdrawn by 2010. Can we compare Iraq to Vietnam then? Not economically. The same article says that the Vietnam War cost only $660 billion in today’s dollars.
4 thoughts on “Iraq is not another Vietnam…”
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FYI – You can access those Wall Street Journal articles for free with a netpass from: http://news.congoo.com
Andrew Tobias blogged about this last week, I thought it was a great tip
OTOH, Iraq will cost a much smaller percentage of GDP.
The consistent thing is that initial cost estimates were off by a factor of 10, see http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1592221
I’ve written about this several times, e.g., http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2006/01/13/fraud-war-iraq/
Of course, the $1T figure assumes we don’t cut and run like we did with Vietnam, thereby abandoning those whose side we were on and sentencing a couple of million to die in the ensuing violence.
Patrick, whose side ARE we on in Iraq? The Sunnis, who were removed from power, or the Shi’ites, who are backed by Iran?