 |
|
Editorial
What the Iraq war is costing
us
Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s trip to the Mideast this week
brought the Iraq war back into the media spotlight, from where it seems
to have vanished. Turns out the war is still there, waiting for us to
pay -attention.
Five years and four months into this war, it’s hard to know where
to begin when tallying the damage. The loss of human life is most devastating.
About 4,400 American soldiers have died, and, depending on your source,
from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. There
are the millions of Iraqis displaced from their homes, the fueling of
sectarian violence, the loss of world respect for the United States, the
creation of a terrorist breeding ground — the damage goes on and
on.
And while we may have a vague sense that this war costs more in dollars
than we can imagine, the American Friends Service Committee found a way
to illustrate the enormity of the actual price. Nobel Prize-winning economist
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes
compiled these numbers, taking into account not only the immediate costs
but also ongoing factors, such as longterm health care for veterans, interest
on debt and replacement of military hardware. And to make these astronomical
figures understandable, the AFSC broke them down to costs per day:
Each day, the war in Iraq costs us $720 million.
Per minute, that’s $500,000.
If those daily dollars were used for human welfare rather than human destruction,
they could buy:
• Homes for 6,482 families, or
• Renewable electricity for 1,274,336 homes, or
• 84 new elementary schools, or
• Salaries for 12,478 elementary school teachers, or
• 95,364 Head Start places for poor chiildren, or
• 34,904 four-year scholarships for university students, or
• They could provide 1,153,846 children with free school lunches,
or
• They could provide 423,529 children with health care
Remember, these figures show the cost of the war for only a single day.
There have been 1,971 days so far, and we have no idea how many more days
to come.
—Diane Chiddister
|
|
