Iraq: Counting the Costs

By SALLY B. DONNELLY

U.S. Military Officers often complain privately that the American people don't fully appreciate the costs--human or economic--of the Iraq war. A new paper by Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes and Nobel-prizewinning Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz may help address that. It claims that the final cost to the U.S. could be $2 trillion--10 times as high as the worst-case scenario of $200 billion suggested by a White House official before the war.

The discrepancy is in part because of Bilmes and Stiglitz's holistic accounting methods.

Their tally goes far beyond the traditional budget lines of the Pentagon, which says $173 billion was spent through September 2005. For instance, the paper includes estimates for the lifetime cost of disability payments and health care for some 16,000 injured soldiers, increased recruitment budgets, and--since the government has not reined in spending or raised taxed--debt financing for war expenditures. The paper also counts macroeconomic effects like the rising price of oil.

Yet even as the war's economic toll worsens, there is some good news on the human front: the number of divorces in the Army declined in 2005, ending a four-year surge. According to Army data obtained by TIME that have not yet been officially released, there were 8,367 divorces in 2005, down from 10,477 in 2004. That number is still higher than the total before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but officials, who concede that year-long deployments can strain marriages, are working on the issue. The Army has raised funding to $3.6 million a year for initiatives to help troops deal with the stresses, and its "family life" chaplains will expand two programs: "Pick a Partner"--troops call it "How Not to Marry a Jerk"--targets single soldiers, while another aims at couples with teens. Chaplain (Major) Robert Nay says his mission is clear: "If I help the soldiers with their personal lives, it will help them focus while they are out on their missions. As the saying goes, 'A soldier enlists, but the family re-enlists.'" With war costs already so high and the Army stretched so thin, that's one front where it can't afford losses.