RS Edit: I actually wrote this two weeks ago when it really was the sixth anniversary of the war, but just published it today. My bad for not realizing it would go to the top of the blog. Enjoy!
According to the AP today is the sixth anniversary of the current War in Iraq. Also according to the AP that particular venture has cost this country (i.e., you, me, and 300 million other taxpaying (or not) Americans) something like 800 billion dollars.
I've been reading Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos, so I started wondering what that figure really meant. Yes, it’s a shitload of money but it’s impossible to visualize. Even in Scientific Notation 800 billion looks like 8 x 10^11, which is easier to write but doesn’t really help comprehension. And bring ups a number of questions in my mind, including:
What does 800 billion buy these days? Let's think about it for a moment. With 800 billion dollars one could buy, pay for, or otherwise provide:
- 120 McDonalds cheeseburgers for every man, woman and child on the Earth;
- 8,422,850 "A-class" shares of Berkshire Hathaway (or the entire company 16 times over;
- 80,000 miles of rural highway or 20,512 miles of urban highway. Let’s say that it would build a highway long enough to circle the earth three times;
- A pair of new 2007 Audi A3s in every driveway in NY state—not that you’d want to;
- The entire American space shuttle program 5.5 times over;
- 5,818,181 F-2 Raptors--enough to arm every country in the world with them several times over;
- Total health care to a population 8 times the size of the U.S., which means the entire populations of China and India.
These are not small things. And while I wouldn't suggest actually doing any of them, it does help provide a sense of scale to the numbers we're discussing.
Now that we have some sense of scale, we can ask a more interesting question: If, as is generally understood at this point in time, the invasion of Iraq was all about securing their oil for our use, then what would it have cost us to simply buy the oil we needed on the international markets over the course of the war?
Given: the U.S. uses about 22 million barrels of the stuff per day, and over six years (2,192 days including 2 leap days) that comes to 48,224,000,000 or 42.224 billion barrels of it.
That’s fine but as we know the price of oil changed drastically between 2003 and now. The only way I can hope to deal with this is taking an average of the price of crude oil each January each year from 2003 to now. It’s not the best method of derivation but it should work here.
Therefore, given that:
Jan 2003: $27
Jan 2004: $34
Jan 2005: $45
Jan 2006: $58
Jan 2007: $65
Jan 2008: $95
Jan 2009: $45
The resulting average is $52.7 (let’s round up to $53/barrel)
So 42.224 billion x 53 = 2,237,872,000,000 or about two and a quarter trillion dollars. A bargain, you say! Well, maybe, maybe not.
$800 billion is just the official cost of the war, meaning supplemental outlays that were approved by Congress over the past six years for this particular overseas action. There are additional costs to be considered as well.
For instance, it’s been said that the cost of a single human life is something like $129,000, a price that’s used for cost analysis by health insurance companies. But that refers to the monetary value of a single year of life for an individual. For that calculation to work in this case, we need to consider average life expectancy as well. So, if the average life expectancy in modern day America is 77 years, and the average soldier is 25 years old, that’s 52 years of life that were cut short by dying in battle. 52 x $129,000 = $6,708,000. Rounding off American deaths to five thousand we get 5,000 x 6,708,000 = $33,540,000,000 or 33 and a half billion dollars.
On the other hand, what about 70,000 or so American troops who were wounded over there? Obviously, they are still alive, but they're not really expecting a normal life any more. For our purposes, let's accommodate this by saying their remaining life expectancy is cut by 25% or 13 years. Keeping the assumptions from the previous calculation, a wounded soldier can expect to live for another 39 years.
So: 70,000 x 39 x $129,000 = $352,170,000,000 or 352 billion dollars and change. Total cost to American livelihoods: 385 and a half billion dollars.
Additionally, it’s been suggested that around a million Iraqis have been killed bring an added cost of its own (I know, I know, some of you will say American lives are worth more than Iraqi lives, but from where I sit, people are people and they’re all worth the same.) There’s also the argument that America really isn’t on the hook for non-American lives ended by American guns and ammo, but as the famous gentleman said, “you break it, you own it.” We killed them, directly or indirectly, their relatives will be thinking of ways to make us horribly uncomfortable (or dead) for years to come, and they’re part of the bill.
However, the average Iraqi (pre-invasion) life expectancy was rather lower than for Americans at 57. We’ll use the same age of death for this computation as we did with the Americans, 25. That means each Iraqi life was worth $129,000 x 32 (the difference between 57 and 25). So 1,000,000 x 129,000 x 32 = 4,128,000,000,000 or 4.128 trillion dollars.
Total (so far): 800 billion + 385.71 billion + 4.128 trillion = 5,313,170,000,000 or 5.31317 trillion dollars.
In other words this adventure has cost us a bit more than two and a half times what it would have cost just to buy the oil we wanted on the open market over the past six years. (Assuming of course, that oil was all we wanted over there.)
There are plenty of other questions and costs we can consider, too. A few that come to mind are:
What are the costs in lost productivity and economic activity in having a majority percentage (60% is a number I see a lot) of the forces there made up of reservists rather than professional troops?
How much oil was burned in the pursuit of this war by the U.S. armed forces?
How much of the stuff has been extracted from Iraq since 2003?
There's more I could say but this is long enough and I think I've made my point. I thought this war was a bad idea back in February 2003, when my wife and I stood out in the bitter cold for six hours behind police barriers to protest the damn thing. I still think it's a bad idea. For all the fancy assumptions about costs and the value of human lives, I think it's fair to say that the loss of any human being to violence is going to be felt by someone. Some of those someones will take it badly indeed. Maybe blaming it on you and yours. Maybe trying to kill you and yours. And maybe succeeding.
None of it had to happen. For my two cents, we'd have been a stronger, safer and better country had it not.
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