U.S. Cost of War In Midlle East

Reuters reports that a new Brown University Study on the cost to the United States of the War on Terror has concluded that as many as a quarter million people have died as a direct result of bombs and bullets and that the final bill for waging war will be at least $3,700,000,000,000.

That $3.7 trillion, incredibly, is more than the entire annual gross domestic product of Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy. It is more than the combined GDP of Great Britain and Canada, or the combined GDP of South Korea, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Argentina, South Africa and Israel. You get the point.

It is far, far more than the $1 trillion President Barack Obama has cited as justification for withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan. According to the Brown study, titled “Costs of War,” the US has already spent between $2.3 and $2.7 trillion waging war since al-Qaeda attacked New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001.

Those attacks, by the way, exceeded Osama bin Laden’s wildest expectations, killing 2,995 people and causing $50- $100 billion in economic damage– and they cost no more than $500,000.

But what’s even more important is the human toll of this seemingly endless war against terrorism, a tactic that will never be eradicated as long as there disaffected and economically disadvantaged people on this planet. For every person killed by al-Qaeda on 9/11, 73 have been killed since. The Brown study measured only those killed directly by bombs and bullets as a result of the War on Terror. That number is between 224,000 and 258,000– the population of the entire city of Orlando, Florida, with 125,000 civilians dying in Iraq alone. And again, the study did not calculate those who have died from lack of health care, clean water and food resulting from the war. It did, however, count 365,000 wounded and 7.8 million– the population of the entire country of Switzerland or the combined populations of the states of New Hampshire, Idaho, West Virginia and Kansas– displaced persons.

These numbers, of course, will only continue to grow as the war drags on. And what’s often overlooked is the cost of taking care of the veterans who have served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. To date, according to the Brown study, nearly half of the 1.25 million War on Terror vets have made health or disability claims, totaling some $32.6 billion. Over the next 40 years, those costs will soar to as high as $934 billion.

Another $401 billion has been spent since 9/11 on Homeland Security. Add another $185 billion in accumulated interest on the debt incurred from borrowing huge sums of money to finance the war. Then there’s the $74 billion spent on war-related foreign aid. Projected war-related spending though the year 2020 adds another $453 billion to the tab.