$3e12
so i saw the latest book puts the price tag of the iraq war at $3 trillion. well gosh golly how high will it go? the gdp of the world is some $50 trillion. i can't imagine the middle east going for more than say 100 years without a major conflict. so that makes an upper limit of some $5 quadrillion dollars. i'm gonna write a book and be so rich. err... would be if the iraq war hadn't killed my profits. anywho, the dollar slumped some 1/3rd since 2000. yeah i know not all of that can directly be blamed on the iraq war. some of it is the high price of oil. but some of that is the iraq war. some more of the dollar's slump is the rest of the world saying we don't like your leadership. but some of that is the iraq war. so anywho, the swag. call it $1 trillion dollars worth of gdp shifted away from the u.s. sorry, that's $1 trillion per year. and we just promised to be in iraq for the long term. sigh. heh. who needs u.n. sanctions when you control the supply of oil? which controls the price of oil. which feeds the us economy. we seem to have been seriously wounded. and no one seems to have noticed yet.