Recent Posts

• What have we learned from Iraq?
• Five Painful Lessons from the Iraq War
• Defense Dept is now the ONLY federal government agency to flunk its audit
• Ten Years in Afghanistan
• New Op-ed in Los Angeles Times by Bilmes and Stiglitz
• Recent commentary by the authors on the costs of 9/11
• Rising US death toll in Afghanistan: lessons from history
• Gloomy reports detail huge fraud, waste and corruption in contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan
• NY Times looks at rising cost of veterans care
• Brown University study estimates cost of wars at $3.7 Trillion since 2001
• Congress considers legislation that would require estimates of the true cost of war
• Stiglitz Bilmes new book chapter in the Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict
• Wars are one of the main reasons why the US debt is so high
• Reprint: Washington Post article on the true cost of war
• British withdraw from Iraq

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As of today, 6001 US troops have been killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.  Nearly 50,000 have been wounded in action, and more than 100,000 have been wounded or injured badly enough (in non-combat accidents) to require medical airlifting out of theatre.  See official Pentagon statistics released today:

http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf

One of the most frequent complaints among Iraqis is the lack of electricity that has been widespread ever since the US invasion in 2003.  After the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein rapidly restored basic services such as electricity, but for various reasons, it has proven extremely difficult for the US to restore electricity services, and over the past eight years, most Iraqis have used back-up home generators to deal with the intermittent service available.

This week it was announced that the US has spent $4.6 billion to restore electricity — including renovating plants, buying power from outside the country and fixing transmission lines.  The total supply of electricity is now approaching 8000 megawatts, which is nearly double what was available before the war.

However, the demand still far outstrips supply — with Iraqis wanting 15,000 megawatts.  This is partly because most Iraqi consumers pay little or nothing for electricity — it is virtually free.   Thus the US taxpayer is not only paying to rebuild the grid, but is effectively subsidizing the electricity supply for Iraqis.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/start_paying_for_war/2011/03/24/AFRAKXWB_story.html?wprss=rss_homepage

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