$210 Billion Down the Hole by Joe Schembrie

Joe Schembrie is an engineer and writer living in Washington. He evaluates whether the taxpayers have gotten our money's worth in Iraq. He writes:

According to the latest estimates, the United States government has spent over two hundred and ten billion dollars on the war in Iraq. How do we put that in perspective?

We could divide $210 billion by 300 million Americans. That would tell us that the war has cost $700 for every man, woman, and child in America.

(How about you? Do you personally feel that you have received seven hundred dollars worth of freedom and security thanks to all the bombs we've dropped in Iraq?)

We can also divide the $210 billion by seventy million American taxpayers. That tells us the war has cost $3000 per taxpayer. Are those taxpayers satisfied with the 'freedom' from life and limb that our weapons have brought to so many Iraqi children – or would those taxpayers have preferred to 'selfishly' spend the money on college tuition and health care for their own children? ...

what have the Iraqis received – aside from demolished cities – for our $210 billion dollars?

Well, they haven't received enough to eat... The twenty-five million people of Iraq could be fed on $75 million a day, or $27 billion a year. That's only a small fraction of the $210 billion we've spent on Iraq. Yet, amid the ruins created by our violent occupation, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children are malnourished...

Nor has anywhere near the bulk of the spending on the Iraq War gone to our soldiers. Divide $210 billion dollars by 160,000 American soldiers in Iraq, and you see that we're spending $1.3 million per soldier. These are the same soldiers complaining about no air conditioning in 110-degree weather, poor medical care, the lack of body armor, the need to scrounge junkyards for vehicle armor, and a shortage of ammunition. None of our soldiers seem to have even $1300 worth of camping gear, let alone $1.3 million worth of high-tech equipment. And they sure aren't receiving $1.3 million apiece in pay...

Perhaps you think that the $210 billion dollars went toward offensive military capability. But it is estimated by President Bush himself that the US military has at most killed only thirty thousand Iraqi insurgents, and if you divide $210 billion dollars by that number, you see that it is costing us $7 million to kill each insurgent. If George Washington had wasted $7 million in logistics to kill each Redcoat, the Continental Congress would have stripped him of command and regarded him as more damaging to the Patriot cause than Benedict Arnold! Today, however, the Bush Administration awards medals to generals who have achieved that astounding level of inefficiency in the Iraq War...

$210 Billion Down the Hole by Joe Schembrie