Harvard Expert Asserts Iraq-Afghan Wars Will Be Most Expensive in US History

Former President George W. Bush
(photo: Fox News)

Remember "Mission Accomplished"? In what seems a lifetime ago, then-President George W. Bush landed a plane onto an aircraft carrier and made his now infamous declaration about the Iraq conflict. The mission turned out to be a disaster. It also became something of a financial albatross for the United States.

The weight of that dead bird was recently estimated by a Harvard University public policy professor. Her cost estimate of the Iraq conflict, combined with Afghanistan military operations, ranges from four trillion to six trillion dollars when all is said and done. Her findings were reported in an article in today's Los Angeles Times.

Other estimates are "merely" two trillion dollars, with $262 billion "in interest on the resulting debt." Whatever one's opinion of America's military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the notion that the conflicts could be paid without raising revenue for them was absurd and deeply dishonest. Conservatives, who believed a tax cut could be managed during a major military conflict, should take a hard look in the mirror for foisting such a damaging fiction on the public during the Bush-Cheney era. To this day, the right-wing remains in profound denial over the Iraq-Afghanistan wars and the cancerous corruption they spawned. Their mission, far from accomplished, seems as nearly bankrupt as our nation really and truly is. That's a shame.