Six years ago on 20 March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. President Bush went to town saying this military invasion of oil rich Iraq was to bring that country, suffering from brutal dictatorship, to democratic governance. Moreover, the United States took upon itself the task to wipe out weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had allegedly kept in his possession.
It did not take long for the people of the United States and the whole world to realise that the pretext of the war was patently false and the Iraq war was bound to be a big failure. President Bush stuck to his gun and pushed Iraq into the Dark Age and the entire world into an unprecedented economic doom. Mercifully, President Barack Obama has reversed the suicidal course by pledging to end the U.S. Combat Mission by August 31, 2010. Today, the U.S. force in Iraq numbers 142,000. Out of this, 92, 000 will be brought home in the next 18 months. The remaining 50,000 will continue till 31 December 2011. Thus the doomed mission will end after eight long years, but the conflict will rage on.
Naturally, one question comes to everyone’s mind: What is the cost of this war? While launching the war, there were various estimates. The official figure was hovering around $57 to $69 billion (adjusting the inflation in 2007). When Larry Lindsey, President’s economic adviser, stated that the cost could touch $200 billion, the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed it saying it was a “balcony” estimate. The Bush Administration believed that part of the war expenses would be borne by other countries and that oil revenues would meet the post-war reconstruction costs.
After six years what is the real cost of the Iraq war? Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Joseph Stiglitz along with Linda J. Bilmes of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government had estimated last year (2008) that the cost of the Iraq war would be more than $ 3 trillion (in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 2008). Incidentally, the U.S. budget for 2010 is $3.55 trillion.
Linda Bilmes is an expert in government finance. Stiglitz and Bilmes have used rigorous, scientific, economic methodology to come to this mind-boggling figure. The formidable data collected from all available as well as rare documents to quantify the cost have been detailed in separate notes from page 273 to 341. The book is an eye opener as to who suffers and to what extent, when rich and powerful nation(s) decide to go to war. Also, it gives an insight into who reaps the riches from the wars.
Two critical issues inter alia dealt with in this book by Stiglitz and Bilmes attract our attention because they speak volumes about deepening crises behind the façade of war.
First is the human cost and its implications for society, economy and nation. The cost of war is not merely expenditure on machine, fuel and personnel but also includes compensating for death and disability and the economic cost of loss of productivity due to loss of lives and disability. Such quantification is not easy. What this publication has done is admirable.
The coalition has incurred 4,576 deaths — 4,259 Americans, in addition to 179 Britons, 33 Italians, 22 Poles, 18 Ukrainians, 11 Spaniards, 13 Bulgarians, and the rest from Australia, Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Denmark, Netherlands, Estonia, Fiji, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Latvia, Romania, El Salvador, Slovakia and Thailand as of March 13, 2009, says the CNN. At least 31,102 U.S. troops have been wounded in action (Pentagon). The number of violent civilian deaths in Iraq is touching a lakh (from March 2003 till February this year the civilian death is 91,059 -99,431 according to Iraq Body Count website).
According to a survey by the American Psychiatric Association, 32 per cent of those who were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from mental health complaints. Another shocking trend is rising suicide rate. In 2007, at least 115 soldiers killed themselves, in 2006 it was 102, and 87 and 67 in 2005 and 2004 respectively. “There were also 166 attempted suicides among troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 935 attempts in the army as a whole, with young, white, unmarried junior enlisted troops the most likely to try. The trend worsened in 2008” (p.213). How does one quantify the loss of life and its impact on society and economy? Take the case of 24 year-old Staff Sergeant Ryan D. Maseth, a Green Beret, who was electrocuted in his living quarters in Baghdad because of faulty wiring by a U.S. contractor. His family will receive $100,000 “as death gratuity” and the Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance has to pay $ 400,000. If he were alive, he would have reached higher professional levels. Maseth’s death has caused much higher economic loss than just $500,000. If we multiply the lives lost, wounded, mentally ill and their impact on economy and society, the three trillion dollar cost is a gross underestimate.
The huge monetary cost of war has had significant implications for the social security and welfare measures within the U.S. The National Priorities Project website estimates that the budgetary amount spent on the war could have provided for nearly 5,103,740 Affordable Housing Units or 193,370,980 people with health care for one year. Stiglitz and Blimes have argued that the diversion of resources to Iraq was one of the main factors due to which the National Guards could not effectively respond to national crises like Hurricane Katrina.
The second frightening issue is the weakened structure of accountability and the increasing corruption. It poses a vital question: whose interests did the Iraq invasion serve? The answer probably lies in the warning President Eisenhower gave as early as 1961 in his farewell speech wherein he warned against the military-industrial complex. The military industrial complex, simply understood, is an informal alliance of the military and related government departments with defence industries that is held to influence government policy.
Stiglitz and Blimes have highlighted this in the case of Iraq by pointing out that the defence contractors have been the most notable beneficiaries of the Iraq conflict as reflected in the rise in share prices of Halliburton, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and others. The linkages of the Bush administration with some of these firms are all too well known. For instance, Dick Cheney formerly headed Halliburton and the Republican Party received $1,146,248 as campaign contribution from it. Throughout the six years of the war it has been funded by emergency funds marked by reduced transparency and lack of detailed analysis. The result has been rampant waste and corruption. “Shoddy accounting practices at the Pentagon and lax oversight of contractors make it difficult to know how much of the money flowing towards private industry is being squandered on abuse, fraud and war profiteering,” write Stiglitz and Blimes. The Defence Department employs 196,000 private contractors. Interestingly, between 1998 and 2004 the Department of Defence’s total spending on contracting increased by 105 per cent while the number of people it employed to award and supervise the contracts declined by 25 per cent. In Iraq the money spent by the U.S. for reconstruction was through American contractors. Henry Waxman, the Congressman from California had revealed that non-Iraqi contractors charged $25 million to repaint twenty police stations – a job the local firms could have done with $5 million.
The book describes the direct and indirect ways of contractors evading tax and never completing work (pp 218-225). While the executives of the big contracting companies make enormous gains, the workers doing “cooking, driving, cleaning, and laundry, are poorly paid nationals from India, Pakistan and other Asian and African countries. Indian cooks are reported to earn $3-$5 per day. At the same time, KBR bills the American taxpayer $100 per load of laundry.” Of course the Indian workers are there against the wishes of the Indian government.
This large scale reliance on private contractors coupled with reduced accountability has led to large scale profiteering and corruption. According to the authors, in America “corruption takes on a more nuanced form than it does elsewhere. Payoffs typically do not take the form of direct bribes, but of campaign contributions to both parties.” Ironically a war fought in the name of democracy has weakened accountability and transparency and degraded governance within the U.S.
All said, President Obama’s decision to end the Messianic war in Iraq is welcome. Whether the new administration will support and encourage conflict resolution and anti-war movements remains to be seen.
