Sunk Costs and Iraq
Three years ago, my 96-year-old grandfather was dying and he was upset. But he wasn’t upset about dying. He approached his own death with great inner strength. What made him upset was that his government had needlessly invaded Iraq. Because Iraq was not a threat, he said, we were squandering precious resources better used at home. The Iraq invasion was an alien idea to my grandfather’s conservative values. Until his death in May of 2004, he lamented that the invasion would result in an intractable mess with no palatable solution.
His assessment has proven correct. Every day, we are paying 200 million more dollars to prolong this bloody occupation. That’s $100,000 per minute. That’s a lot of money. St. Louis baseball fans who revel at the near completion of the new stadium for the St. Louis Cardinals might appreciate that this war effort is the financial equivalent of buying a new major league baseball stadium every two days. The cost of the Iraq war so far could have paid for 32 million children to attend a year of Head Start.
The $350 billion we will have spent on this war (by the end of 2006) amounts to more than $3,500 for each American household. There is also a more precious resource to consider; the occupation is killing more than sixty American soldiers every month, almost 2,400 troops killed to date. This is the equivalent of crashing a packed airliner every other month. Nor must we forget that this …
