As in trillion. Three trillion. That’s unimaginable as numbers go, but what’s the importance of it? According to a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, that is how much the Iraq war has cost the United States. Stiglitz is a former member of President Clinton’s COuncil of Economic Advisors and a critic of globalization. According to the Guardian newspaper:

Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn. The figure was so low, they didn’t believe it, and decided to investigate. The paper they wrote together, and published in January 2006, revised the figure sharply upwards, to between $1 and $2 trillion. Even that, Stiglitz says now, was deliberately conservative: “We didn’t want to sound outlandish.”

Stiglitz and Bilmes dug deeper, and what they have discovered, after months of chasing often deliberately obscured accounts, is that in fact Bush’s Iraqi adventure will cost America - just America - a conservatively estimated $3 trillion. The rest of the world, including Britain, will probably account for about the same amount again. And in doing so they have achieved something much greater than arriving at an unimaginable figure: by describing the process, by detailing individual costs, by soberly listing the consequences of short-sighted budget decisions, they have produced a picture of comprehensive obfuscation and bad faith whose power comes from its roots in bald fact.

Three trillion dollars could have fixed Social Security for the next five hundred years (that would be important to our children’s great-great-great grandchildren’s great-great-great-great grandchildren) or hired 45 million public school teachers. By 2017, we Americans will have paid $1 trillion in interest payments on the debt required just to fight this war. Since we as a people aren’t doing all that much saving, we’re paying this debt to countries like China and Dubai.

Their book, which also details how the true costs were hidden by the administration, is called The Three Trillion Dollar War, authors Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, and it is published by Allen Lane.