The Cost of War $2.5 TRILLION – Accrual Cost of Bush War on Women & Children

Gideon Polya, MWC NEWS

A recent article in the highly respected humanitarian UK journal The New Statesman quoted an estimate of the accrual cost (i.e. the long-term committed cost) of the Bush War on Terror at $2.5 TRILLION – and the estimate came from 2001 Economics Nobel Laureate US Professor Stiglitz (Columbia) and Professor Linda Bilmes (Harvard). A major long-term cost is due to the death and injury of US soldiers. Thus the article states that "for every soldier dying in Iraq or Afghanistan today, 16 are being wounded"; that "611,729 veterans from the first Gulf war are now receiving disability benefits; a large proportion are suffering from psychiatric illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression"; and that "Bilmes and Stiglitz estimate the additional cost to the economy of the death of a young soldier - typically 25 years old - to be $6.5m". A horrifying aspect of the New Statesman story was Veteran’s Administration (VA) reactions after Professor Bilmes went public: thus "the number of wounded listed on the VA website dropped from 50,508 to 21,649". The Bush Administration has also evidently made VA economics expert Professor Bilmes persona non grata..

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