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The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

Article Excerpt
The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 2008. Hardcover: ISBN 978 393 06701 9, $???. 192 pages.

This was a difficult book to review in the sense that I approached it with a strong sense of bias in its favor. Its title tells us where the argument is going so we know the trajectory before we launch ourselves into the statistics. This book holds accuracy and credibility that stems partly from the presentation, and partly from its authors. Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Laureate who is not to be taken lightly and Linda Bilmes writes from the Harvard School of Government. Together they provide us with a roadmap of the path this country took to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In so doing, they show us how the institutional safeguards that should have been there either were missing, lacking or simply circumvented by the current administration. This is the story of the failure of the institutions of a democracy.

The evidence contained here is stated in "economic form." That...

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