Ethics Newsline®

“Under reasonable scenarios, assuming we don’t pull out rapidly, we may only be halfway through. Even in direct budgetary costs, it’s quite easy to get up on the order of $1 trillion for Iraq alone.”

– Steven Koziak, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, a nonpartisan research group, speaking to the New York Times about the cost of the Iraq war. As the U.S. engagement in Iraq marks its five-year anniversary, the Times examines a range of views on why most estimates of the war’s cost were vastly wrong, how much the entanglement ultimately may cost, and the motives of those providing the estimates.

Source: New York Times, Mar. 19.