“Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will.”
--Richard Perle, chair, The Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, July 11, 2002
“The likely economic effects [of a war in Iraq] would be relatively small…. Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits.”
--Lawrence Lindsey, White House economic adviser, September 16, 2002
“It is unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions of dollars.”
--Kenneth Pollack, former director for Persian Gulf affairs, September 2002
“The costs of any intervention would be very small.”
--Glenn Hubbard, White House economic adviser, October 4, 2002
“Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.”
--Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary, February 18, 2003
Think Progress"We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.”
--Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, March 27, 2003
Also:
What happened:Mitch Daniels... the war will be an “affordable endeavor” and rejects an estimate by the chief White House economic adviser that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion as “very, very high.” [Christian Science Monitor, 1/10/06]
"In terms of the American taxpayers contribution, [$1.7 billion] is it for the US. The rest of the rebuilding of Iraq will be done by other countries and Iraqi oil revenues. The American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this." --USAID Director Andrew Natsios, 4/23/03
American Progress
Report: Price Tag for Wars Is At Least $3.7 Trillion
"When President Barack Obama cited cost as a reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan, he referred to a $1 trillion price tag for America’s wars.
Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released on Wednesday.
The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. (http://www.costsofwar.org)
In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al Qaeda leaders behind the September 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion.
Those numbers will continue to soar when considering often overlooked costs such as long-term obligations to wounded veterans and projected war spending from 2012 through 2020. The estimates do not include at least $1 trillion more in interest payments coming due and many billions more in expenses that cannot be counted, according to the study."
Frum Forum
And:
Economist Stiglitz Says Iraq War Costs May Reach $5 Trillion
March 1, 2008
March 1 (Bloomberg) -- Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz, author of a new book that claims the Iraq war will cost the U.S. more than $3 trillion, said the final tally is likely to climb much higher than that.
"It's much more like five trillion,'' Stiglitz said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. ' 'We were trying to make Americans understand how expensive this war was so we didn't want to quibble about a dime here or a dime there.''
Bloomberg
*war *cost