War in Iraq could cost USA trillions of dollars

The Iraq war is likely to cost the United States some 1 or 2 trillion dollars, despite earlier assurances by the White House that these expenses would be manageable.

This is reported by a new study co-authored by a Nobel Prize winning economist.

The research, which was made public Monday by Joseph Stiglitz from Columbia University, a 2001 Nobel Prize laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, and economy Professor Linda Bilmes from Harvard University, argues current official assessments of the war cost fail to consider key expenses likely to dog the US budget for years to come.

They include rising medical expenses to treat more than 16,000 wounded soldiers, accelerated depreciation of military hardware on the battlefield and the ripple effect on higher oil prices on the US economy, which in part can be blamed on the military ventur, AFP reports.

"Even taking a conservative approach, we have been surprised at how large they are," Stiglitz and Bilmes wrote of the costs of the war. "We can state, with some degree of confidence, that they exceed a trillion dollars."

V.Y.