According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor on January 9, 2006: “In an independent analysis of the current, long-term, direct, and indirect costs of the Iraq War, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes concluded that the total costs of the war, compared with costs incurred by the U.S. government had the war not been launched, would probably be more than $2 trillion. This conclusion was based on assumptions that U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for four more years, but at decreasing levels, and that the federal government will have to bear interest costs on loans made to finance the war, sharply higher recruitment costs for the armed forces, the cost of equipment replacement, the costs of health care for injured veterans, and tax revenues lost as a result of reduced years of productive labor by servicemen and -women killed and wounded in the war.”
– Ian S. Lustick, Trapped in the War on Terror, Page 23