That's 2,000 billions

This is expensive, and is going to stay expensive.

U.S. Military Officers often complain privately that the American people don't fully appreciate the costs—human or economic—of the Iraq war. A new paper by Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes and Nobel-prizewinning Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz may help address that. It claims that the final cost to the U.S. could be $2 trillion—10 times as high as the worst-case scenario of $200 billion suggested by a White House official before the war.

The discrepancy is in part because of Bilmes and Stiglitz's holistic accounting methods.

Their tally goes far beyond the traditional budget lines of the Pentagon, which says $173 billion was spent through September 2005. For instance, the paper includes estimates for the lifetime cost of disability payments and health care for some 16,000 injured soldiers, increased recruitment budgets, and—since the government has not reined in spending or raised taxed—debt financing for war expenditures. The paper also counts macroeconomic effects like the rising price of oil.

Gee, I hope that oil revenue we heard would finance the war starts rolling in soon.

"The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years," Wolfowitz said in March 2003.

You remember Paul Wolfowitz? He's the guy Bush subsequently appointed to head the World Bank. As you can see from that comment, Wolfowitz had the attributes Bush looks for in his nominees -- a total lack of qualifications and the willingness to say or do anything in support of Bush's ruinous policies.