Iraq War: How Does $2 Trillion Sound?

Boy. I was beginning to think that I was going out on a limb when I was saying that a more honest accounting of the Iraq war would show a price more like $500-750 billion. Seems even I've been lowballing it:

A new study by two leading academic experts suggests that the costs of the Iraq war will be substantially higher than previously reckoned. In a paper presented to this week’s Allied Social Sciences Association annual meeting in Boston MA., Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes and Columbia University Professor and Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz calculate that the war is likely to cost the United States a minimum of nearly one trillion dollars and potentially over $2 trillion.

The study expands on traditional budgetary estimates by including costs such as lifetime disability and health care for the over16,000 injured, one fifth of whom have serious brain or spinal injuries. It then goes on to analyze the costs to the economy, including the economic value of lives lost and the impact of factors such as higher oil prices that can be partly attributed to the conflict in Iraq. The paper also calculates the impact on the economy if a proportion of the money spent on the Iraq war were spent in other ways, including on investments in the United States.

As a point of reference, the Apollo program cost something like $100 billion.

It's difficult to think of something that the US couldn't do with $2 trillion dollars. And I'm trying. Um... colonize Pluto, anyone?