The bill for one of America’s dumbest wars has come due and it’s a dousy. A report by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies claims the U.S spent over $2.2 trillion on the Iraq War with at least 1340,000 Iraqi civilians being killed.

Among the group’s main findings:

  • More than 70 percent of those who died of direct war violence in Iraq have been civilians — an estimated 134,000. This number does not account for indirect deaths due to increased vulnerability to disease or injury as a result of war-degraded conditions. That number is estimated to be several times higher.
  • The Iraq War will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers at least $2.2 trillion. Because the Iraq war appropriations were funded by borrowing, cumulative interest through 2053 could amount to more than $3.9 trillion.
  • Th $2.2 trillion figure includes care for veterans who were injured in the war in Iraq, which will cost the United States almost $500 billion through 2053.
  • The total of U.S. service members killed in Iraq is 4,488. At least 3,400 U.S. contractors have died as well, a number often under-reported.
  • Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries.
  • Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to seek health care outside the country.
  • The $60 billion spent on reconstruction for Iraq has not gone to rebuilding infrastructure such as roads, health care, and water treatment systems, but primarily to the military and police. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has found massive fraud, waste, and abuse of reconstruction funds.

Remember Washington spends too much on social programs. We need to cut Social Security and Medicare because we can not afford such extravagances. Instead, we should spend trillions of dollars on fruitless wars that kill thousands of our people and possibly hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who get caught in the crossfire.

The Neoliberals got their war and now they want to cut social programs to pay for it.