Pentagon adamantly insisted that the war would be a relatively cheap one. Roughly $50 billion is all it would take to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, it said.
Calculations by Harvard's Linda Bilmes and Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz remain most prominent.
They determined that, once you factor in things like medical costs for injured troops, higher oil prices and replenishing the military, the war will cost America upwards of $2 trillion. That doesn't include any of the costs incurred by Iraq, or America's coalition partners.
"Would the American people have had a different attitude toward going to war had they known the total cost?" Bilmes and Stiglitz ask in their report. "We might have conducted the war in a manner different from the way we did."
Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs, the Worldwatch Institute, and the United Nations, with that same money the world could:
Eliminate extreme poverty around the world (cost $135 billion in the first year, rising to $195 billion by 2015.)
Achieve universal literacy (cost $5 billion a year.)
Immunize every child in the world against deadly diseases (cost $1.3 billion a year.)
Ensure developing countries have enough money to fight the AIDS epidemic (cost $15 billion per year.)
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