Iraq War: That's a Lot of Money

In Talking Points Memo Cafe,

Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes plan to present this week a paper estimating the cost of the Iraq War at between $1-2 trillion. This is far higher than earlier estimates of $100-200 billion.

My handy-dandy built-in Windows calculator accessory says that works out to about $30,000 per Iraqi. I've often wondered about whether it would work for the US to just dissolve the military and instead to bribe countries into doing what we want. We could have offered Saddam Hussein $2 billion to step down, offered each high-level member of the Baath party $1 million to quietly get out of Iraq, and still had enough money left over to bribe all the Sunnis in Iraq to peacefully support a new government.