It may be that the Iraq war is "rapidly shaping up to be the third-most expensive war in United States history," as this report in the CSM claims, and I'm on record as being a war skeptic, but a couple of caveats.
First, even assuming that they've correctly adjusted for inflation, it's not at all clear to me that the comparison is a fair one. After all, it seems like we spend an awful lot of money on high-tech weapons these days precisely to hold down losses among both our own troops and civilians. If you factored in reasonable assumptions about the value of the lives lost, I suspect the Iraq war would drop a lot in comparison to high casualty wars like WWI or WWII. As the reporter himself admits:
That's in money, not in blood and tears. Fatalities from the combined Afghanistan-Iraq conflict now exceed 2,000. American participation in 1917-18 in World War I, a war infamous for its trench-warfare slaughter, resulted in 53,513 US deaths.
Basic economics tells us that that differential has to be assessed in analyzing cost-benefit arguments:
It is sometimes necessary in CBA to evaluate the benefit of saving human lives. There is considerable antipathy in the general public to the idea of placing a dollar value on human life. Economists recognize that it is impossible to fund every project which promises to save a human life and that some rational basis is needed to select which projects are approved and which are turned down. The controversy is defused when it is recognized that the benefit of such projects is in reducing the risk of death. There are many cases in which people voluntarily accept increased risks in return for higher pay, such as in the oil fields or mining, or for time savings in higher speed in automobile travel. These choices can be used to estimate the personal cost people place on increased risk and thus the value to them of reduced risk. This computation is equivalent to placing an economic value on the expected number of lives saved. (Link)
Second, it seems grossly unfair to combine the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In terms of cost-benefit analysis, it seems obvious that one needs to separate out the two conflicts. When an actor makes two independent decisions, CBA typically looks at each decision separately, unless the two are inextricably linked. With a few exceptions on the very farthest reaches of both right and left, almost everybody agrees that the Afghan had to be fought regardless of whether we took on Iraq or not.
Legitimate arguments against the war are one thing, but this argument strikes me as pretty bogus. If you're going to make an economic argument against the war, which is the nature of the argument being made in the CSM report, you ought to do your cost- benefit analysis fairly.
