Iraq war set to be more expensive than Vietnam

Just when you think there's nothing more to be said that could further increase your exasperation at the idiocy that has led to the present day carnage on the streets of Iraq, comes this.

The Iraq War will cost the US more than the war in Vietnam.

The Bush administration has refused to provide any specific overall figure for the war's cost. But the Senate is set to approve another emergency spending bill in May, meaning that Iraq will have consumed $101bn in fiscal 2006 alone, almost double the $51bn of 2003, the year of the invasion itself - and all at a time when the federal budget deficit is running at near record levels.

But these figures pale beside what lies in store, the CRS says in its analysis. The Bush administration is desperate to announce a reduction in the 130,000-strong US force before November's mid-term elections, where public disillusion with the war threatens disaster for the Republicans.

However, even if everything goes relatively smoothly, costs until a phase-out is complete could top $370bn. This would make the Iraq conflict, now into its fourth year, more expensive financially than the Vietnam War, which lasted eight years. Vietnam claimed 58,000 American lives, far more than the almost 2,400 lost in Iraq thus far. But in today's dollars it cost "only" $549bn, much less than the $690bn for Iraq, and a projected combined $811bn bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is a far cry from the weeks before the war, when a White House official was rapped on the knuckles for suggesting the cost might be between $100bn and $200bn, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, was touting "a number that's somewhere under $50bn".

It's impossible to add up the many varied ways that these ideologues got it wrong on this one. From Rumsfeld's projected costs, to Cheney saying they would "be greeted as liberators". To both Bush and Blair confidently telling each other that there would be no tensions between the Sunnis and the Shias.

At every turn, from the dissolution of the army to the abject failure to provide enough troops to restore order, let alone protect the Iraqi cultural treasures that were looted; this group of people have been proven an unmitigated failure.

And yet all the main players remain in office whilst telling us that we should export democracy as it makes politicians accountable.

They have no sense of irony, never mind honour.

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