The Post refers to an estimate of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, former Senior Vice-President of the World Bank, and Harvard professor in public finance, Linda J. Bilmes, putting the total cost of occupation for the US at more than $2.2 trillion. Taking the appropriation of $280 million a day in funding bills passed by the US Congress and $440 million daily in incurred, but unpaid, long-term costs, it comes to roughly $720 million a day, or $500,000 a minute.

According to the two experts, in arriving at this mind-boggling magnitude, they have not taken into account “macro-economic consequences” such as higher oil prices, loss of trade and jihadi terrorism because of anti-American sentiments and lost productivity of killed or injured US soldiers.

Recently, a citizens’group, The American Friends Service Committee, organised protest rallies in a number of major US cities with banners and pamphlets showing in bold letters the sacrifices this involves for the people of the US in terms of health care, Head Start programmes, new elementary schools, free school lunches, renewable energy and hiring new teachers. It turns out that the money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could provide 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity.

It is doubtful whether the US Administration will be moved by such revelations to loosen its hold on Iraq. It has got into a morbid fixation that Iraq is absolutely critical to preserving national security, and is prepared to go to any lengths to make it a vassal state. Barely six months ago, it carried out a ‘surge’, sending 30,000 additional American troops, despite warnings from the CIA, that “the inability” of the Iraqi government to govern seems “irreversible”, and the possibility of turning it around was remote.

After Mr Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, the UK is perceptibly disengaging itself from the self-inflicted entanglement in Iraq, with the new Foreign Office Minister, Mr Mark Malloch Brown, openly wanting the British government to keep its distance from the Bush administration instead of Britain and the US being “joined at the hip”. Britain has also been highly critical of the US dragooning it into war without a clear-cut exit strategy.

Pressure is mounting both within the US Congress and outside for the US to quit by the summer. But the most that General David H. Petraeus, Commander, Multi-National Force in Iraq, could promise was to bring the number of troops to the pre-surge level in the next nine months.

Maybe, the US could outsource the finding of a solution for Iraq to a Brains Trust composed of four or five eminent persons of high credentials in administration, reconstruction, security and defence drawn from countries such as Britain, France, Germany, Russia and India.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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