'From the Gallery'

March 14, 2008

• Not even bankers can quite understand what three trillion US dollars means, except it is a colossal amount of money. George Bush has borrowed this on behalf of US taxpayers to fund the Iraq war.

• This estimate is not from some ratbag leftie but Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz authors of the book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. Linda Bilmes is Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard and is a former Deputy Secretary of the US Treasury. Interviewed by Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast this week, Bilmes explained this was not a wild guess, but a closely researched calculation, which took into account the cost of the first Gulf War.

• Nor did it just consider the cost of keeping the troops in Iraq and equipping them. It also considered such huge costs as the on-going repatriation benefits going to former soldiers over their lifetime.

• It comes as a shock to realise the three trillion was borrowed (and more may be borrowed). If Bush had accepted the wonderful economic theory of former treasurer Peter Costello, who was totally against any government borrowing, there wouldn’t have been any war at all. We are very grateful Pete didn’t borrow for our war costs.