From today’s Los Angeles Times.
This estimate includes costs the government will have to pay for years
to come (e.g. disabled veterans’ benefits) and the cost to our economy
and society (e.g. the dislocation of the work force), compiled by a
former assistant secretary of Commerce and a professor at Columbia who
won the Nobel Prize in economics:
invested the money in the United States instead of in Iraq…
The [weapons] inspectors said they required a few months to complete their work.
Several of our closest allies, including France and Germany, were
urging the U.S. to await the outcome of the inspections. There were, as
we now know, conflicting intelligence reports.
Had we waited, the value of the information we would have learned
from the inspectors would arguably have saved the nation at least $1
trillion