Ever wondered where all the money goes? Ever wondered why even in the richest countries in the world, Americans and the Brits struggle to get their schools funded, their health care sorted and their leisure facilities up-dated? It’s been the same old story over the decades and next week we are told things in the UK are going to get a whole lot worse. Ok, we know that a few billion are regularly siphoned off in city bonuses and quite a few more billion are sloshing around in the off shore bank accounts of a handful of obscenely rich entrepreneurs, industry barons, currency speculators and general city spivs. We will never forget that great little one-liner; behind every great fortune lies a great crime. 

The truth of that little saying grows louder by the day. But, in the general scheme of things, this stuff is small change. The really big money, it seems, is tied up in the military- industrial complex, where the sums are ultimately measured in trillions rather than millions and billions. So next time you’re out trying to raise a few quid to keep your local sports centre open, just take the time to read Joseph Stiglitz’s, The Three Trillion Dollar War and you will get a blunt reminder of where the big money, our public money, is going.

For the most part, the text is a little dry, a little bogged down in detail, but in one sense, that makes it all the more credible. Despite Stiglitz’s obvious sympathy to the victims of war on all sides, there is a danger that his work turns out to be a handbook on how to run a more efficient war without all the waste and profiteering. This shouldn’t be that surprising given that Stiglitz was Chief Economist at the World Bank until 2000. What Stiglitz is all about is running global capitalism a little more rationally, a little more humanely. The trouble for Stiglitz is that capitalism just doesn’t seem to want to conform to those lofty ideals.

Notwithstanding the idealism behind Stiglitz’s world vision, he still has many useful and informed things to say about the current state of play. If you don’t have the time to plough through all the statistics, the opening few pages will be enough to set the stage of what follows. In the preface Stiglitz and his co-author, Linda Bilmes has this to say;

By now it is clear that the US invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake. Nearly 4,000 US troops have been killed, and more than 58,000 have been wounded, injured or fallen seriously ill. One hundred thousand US soldiers have returned from the war suffering from serious mental health disorders, a significant fraction of which will be chronic afflictions. Miserable though Saddam Hussein’s regime was, life is actually worse for the Iraqi people now. The country’s roads, schools, hospitals, homes, and museums have been destroyed and its citizens have less access to electricity and water than before the war. Sectarian violence is rife. Iraq’s chaos has made the country a magnet for terrorists of all stripes. When the full price of the war has been paid, trillions of dollars will have been added to our (US) national debt. We estimate that the total budgetary and economic cost to the United States will turn out to be around $3trillion, with the cost to the rest of the world perhaps doubling that number again.

The scale of the figures may be new and astounding but the futility of the war is already well known. What Stiglitz fails to underline in his preface is the outright criminality of the war by the US and its junior partners. Stiglitz also fails to mention to his readers that Saddam Hussein’s ‘miserable regime’ was the very same regime that was financed and armed by the United States as a battering ram against the bellicose Iranian Islamic regime next door. The fact that those obscurantist Iranian Mullahs now have a great deal of influence in Iraq is one of the great ironies of modern history. The added fact that al Qaeda now has a foothold in Iraq is a further irony given that previously Saddam had had no truck with Islamic extremists, the Baathists preferring a more secular form of dictatorship.

When Stiglitz starts talking specific numbers he is at his most useful. Take for example these few lines which compare military expenditure to what might have been socially possible instead:

At the beginning of the second Bush administration, the president talked about the seriousness of the country’s Social Security crisis. But instead of paying for the Iraq war we could have fixed the Social Security problem for the next half century. Today, a Web site run by the National Priorities Project describes the current and direct military costs of the war. A trillion dollars could have built 8 million housing units, could have hired some 15 million additional public school teachers for one year; could have paid for 120 million children to attend a year of Head Start; or insured 530 million children for health care for one year; or provided 43 million students with four-year scholarships at public universities. Now (says Stiglitz) multiply those numbers by three.

Stiglitz continues the number crunching only this time putting things into an international perspective:

The United States gives some $5 billion a year to Africa, the poorest continent in the world: that amounts to less than ten days fighting. Two trillion dollars would enable us to meet our commitments to the poorest countries for the next third of a century.

Stiglitz adds:

The world had committed itself to eradicating illiteracy by 2015. Fully funding that campaign would cost some $8 billion a year roughly two weeks fighting the war.

Warming to his theme, Stiglitz notes:

We have bungled our efforts to help Iraqis with reconstruction. In 2003, Congress approved $18.4 billion in reconstruction aid for the country a sum that is three times per Iraqi what we spent for each European during the Marshall Plan. But instead of spending the money immediately to help fix the electricity, oil refineries, and schools of Iraq, the United States tied up most of the funds in endless bureaucratic squabbling between the Pentagon procurement office and Congress. Much of the money was refunneled into military activities or not spent at all.

To further emphasise his point, Stiglitz makes some historical comparisons:

The cost of direct US military operations not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans already exceeds the cost of the twelve year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War. And even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War and twice that of World War I.

Making the necessary adjustments for inflation, according to Stiglitz, it now costs four times as much to pay for a US troop in Iraq than it did for a similar fighting unit during the Second World War.

The number crunching goes on and on and the reader quickly comes to grasp the sheer economic lunacy as well as the criminality of these types of neo-colonial wars. There can be little doubt that if NATO countries continue along this path they will almost certainly bankrupt themselves. The imminent savage spending cuts in the UK are just a taste of things to come. So when your local leisure centre pleads poverty and puts up the prices of facility hire, you will know exactly where the money went and who’s to blame.

Ain’t war hell!