Monday, October 01 2007 @ 08:25 AM PDT
Contributed by: Admin
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What happens in a minute?

In the Iraq war – as in any war -- lives are ended and destroyed, homes are demolished and families are broken within the space of a minute. And, according to a new analysis by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the U.S. is spending half a million dollars each minute of the war. In a day, the toll comes to $720 million. The group based its figures, unveiled in “Cost of War” exhibits in major US cities on Sept. 20 and 21, on the work of former World Bank chief economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda Bilmes.

An Iraq Minute: Calculating the Cost of War

By Kari Lydersen
Infoshop News
October 1, 2007

What happens in a minute?

In the Iraq war – as in any war -- lives are ended and destroyed, homes are demolished and families are broken within the space of a minute. And, according to a new analysis by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the U.S. is spending half a million dollars each minute of the war. In a day, the toll comes to $720 million. The group based its figures, unveiled in “Cost of War” exhibits in major US cities on Sept. 20 and 21, on the work of former World Bank chief economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda Bilmes.

The AFSC’s numbers include money already spent on the war and future costs including long-term medical care for injured vets, replacement and repair of military equipment and interest on debt accrued to finance the war. It is estimated one in five returning vets have severe brain or spinal injuries which will require nearly constant care for the rest of their lives.

“There are 2.6 million veterans currently receiving disability pay, including a sobering 40 percent of the soldiers who served during the four-week-long Gulf War in 1991,” says a 2006 article by Stiglitz and Bilmes in the Milken Institute Review. “Accrued liabilities for US federal employees’ and veterans’ benefits now total $4.5 trillion…These numbers are unlikely to fall. More than half of the troops in Iraq have served two or three tours of duty under grueling conditions. Moreover, depleted uranium used in armor-piercing artillery shells because it is hard, heavy and cheap, was implicated in many of the medical claims by solders from the First Gulf War. And the same radioactive material was used in the toppling of Saddam Hussein.”

Better body armor and medical technology also mean that injuries which would have killed soldiers in past wars are now survivable – but with astronomical medical costs and tolls on human lives.

Stiglitz and Bilmes estimated the cost of the war at $2.2 trillion total, not counting interest on debt. The AFSC calculated likely interest payments based on numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates that the US racked up $178 billion in interest charges on war debt through 2006, before the troop surge.

“This war is being paid for as if it were with the swipe of a credit card,” said Michael McConnell, executive director of the AFSC’s Chicago office. “It is all borrowed money, with interest on the debt piling up.”

The AFSC’s estimate does NOT include indirect long-term war costs described by Bilmes and Stiglitz including higher oil prices, trade lost because of increasing anti-American sentiment and lost productivity of killed and injured US soldiers – they assign a scientifically calculated “statistical value” of $6.5 million for each US death or veteran placed on full disability. Not to mention the “cost” of Iraqi deaths and rebuilding Iraq.

In their Milken Institute Review paper, Bilmes and Stiglitz conclude by raising the question of whether the costs – aside from all the other moral, ethical and tactical questions – mean the US should end the war.

“Just as going to war was a matter of choice, staying in Iraq is also a matter of choice. There may be costs associated with leaving. But there will be costs associated with staying. Every day we stay in Iraq we accrue costs that will be reflected in budget outlays, lost productivity and individual pain and suffering for decades to come. We need to ask: are they outweighed by the benefits?”

On large banners placed in downtowns in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Sioux City, a Baltimore suburb and other locations, the AFSC showed the trade-off in social services and resources in terms of “war dollars.” The cost of one day of the Iraq war, they say, could: create over 95,000 Head Start slots for kids, buy 6,482 homes for families, provide healthcare for 423,529 children or 163,525 people, hire 12,478 elementary school teachers, outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, sponsor almost 35,000 four-year college scholarships or provide 1.15 million free school lunches.

As executive director of the group Latinos United in Chicago, Maricela Garcia has been lobbying state legislators for $25 million to build five new preschools for mostly Latino immigrant neighborhoods, to serve thousands of immigrant children now on waiting lists or not able to get to preschools in distant neighborhoods. She points out that by the project’s calculations, that’s less than an hour of war.

“It seemed like such a big amount when we were asking for it and they said no,” she said. “But that’s just 50 minutes of war. The priorities we’ve chosen to fund say something about the soul of our nation. We’re choosing to compromise our future.” Chicago college student Erin Polley, 26, noted that almost two thirds of graduating four-year college students are saddled with debt of at least $15,000.

“When I graduate I’ll be tens of thousands of dollars in debt, it’s something I always think about when people ask what I’m going to do in the future,” she said. “It will really make a difference in what I decide to do with my life, and yet we spend money like that so freely on the war.”

Gene Horcher, 69, a member of the Chicago group Metro Seniors in Action, sees a direct connection between taxpayer funds being spent on the war and severe cuts in Chicago’s public transit system and para-transit system for senior citizens and disabled people. It is estimated Chicago Transit Authority service could be restored to desired levels with about $100 million – a few hours of war.

“With these cuts your grandmother will have a lot more trouble getting around, she won’t be able to go shopping and visit her family and go to church,” Horcher said. “But I guess the war folks would say, ‘Granny can just stay home and watch the war on TV.’”