A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Iraq War
Wallsten and Kosec at the AEI have a new working paper doing a cost-benefit analysis of the Iraq War, in the style of the old Davis et al. paper that I blogged about long ago (use the old search engine if you want to find my entry on it). They find that the cost of the war is about 1 trillion dollars and the benefit (from not having to contain Saddam and from saved Iraqi lives) is about 429 billion. I don’t know if they divide the costs between the costs of the war to topple Saddam (which achieved most of the benefits) and the cost to rebuild Iraq.