To see a running count of the cost of the war in Iraq, go to the
Cost of War page at the National Priorities Project. As of today, we're over $217 billion.
Let's be optimists and say that the war has just peaked and will begin to wind down from here. That means we'll spend a total of about $400 billion on this venture. We see numbers like that all the time in this context, and they're easy to skim over without thinking, but pause with me to consider just how vast a sum that is.
What does it mean to the average family of four in our nation of 300 million? An expense of about $5,300. That'd buy a lot of gas for the car and heating oil for the winter, even at today's prices. We learned in the latest
ABC News/Washington Post poll that 60% think the Iraq war was "Not Worth Fighting." What if it were asked this way: "Would you take home $1,333 for yourself and every member of your family AND erase the Iraq war from history?" Think the takers would be better than 60%?
Just how big a number is 400 billion? Let's suppose Patrick Fitzgerald kept himself very, very busy and was able to hand out 400 billion indictments. Each of these indictments might be a few pages, or about 1 mm, thick. The stack would be so enormous that it would actually reach the moon, about 240,000 miles away.
Or let's suppose Mike Brown "works" at FEMA at his fat current salary of $148,000 a year. To be able to pay for the Iraq war now, his first day on the job would have been about 2.7 million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch. The Arctic ice cap would just have been forming, and his hominid friends at FEMA would have been Australopithecus, a predecessor of Homo sapiens. (Of course, history does repeat itself.) A minimum-wage ($5.15/hour) worker, at 40 hours a week, would have needed about 29 million years to accomplish the feat. That worker's job would be as old as the Himalayas and the Mediterranean Sea.
Not to pick on Brownie too much - oh, but let's! Suppose he's dining at a fine Georgetown restaurant, say Citronelle, and he enjoys a 1 oz. (30 cc) serving of beluga caviar while he snickers at the scatological references within the urgent emails showing up on his BlackBerry. If he kicked back long enough to order 400 billion such servings, he would have enough caviar to fill the entire volume of the Superdome.
Just trying to keep a grip on how absurdly expensive this war is.