In a 2002 Washington Post piece, George W. Bush adviser Kenneth Adelman notoriously predicted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”
This week somebody sent me an unsigned email presenting a batch of numbers related to the war in Iraq. I doubt that the sender was an unbiased source; I assume it was somebody who opposed the war. But the numbers checked out, and they’re sobering.
Some examples:
- Time elapsed since the invasion of Iraq: Eight years and 200-plus days
- Number of U.S. military fatalities: 4,479.
- Number of U.S. military injuries: 30,182.
- Number of documented civilian deaths: around 112,000
- Number of displaced Iraqis in Iraq: 2.8 million.
- Federal funding for the war through fiscal 2011: $806 billion.
- The war’s total economic impact to the U.S. (according to authors Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes): $3 trillion -plus.
w Number of weapons of mass destruction discovered in Iraq: 0.
