Pretty soon, it's like real money...

[lsanderson]

Iraq and Your Wallet
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.

So aside from the rising body counts and all the other good reasons to adopt a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, here’s another: We are spending vast sums there that would be better spent rescuing the American health care system, developing alternative forms of energy and making a serious effort to reduce global poverty.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to “finance its own reconstruction.”

But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion — perhaps more than $2 trillion. The higher sum would amount to $6,600 per American man, woman and child. More

NY Times Editorial
Trying to Contain the Iraq Disaster

No matter what President Bush says, the question is not whether America can win in Iraq. The only question is whether the United States can extricate itself without leaving behind an unending civil war that will spread more chaos and suffering throughout the Middle East, while spawning terrorism across the globe. More

Lieberman’s Words on the War Show Some Shifts Over the Years
By JENNIFER MEDINA and ANNE E. KORNBLUT

HARTFORD, Oct. 23 — The widely watched campaign for United States Senate here has largely been a war of words over the war in Iraq — a war, primarily, over the words of the incumbent, Joseph I. Lieberman.

Ned Lamont, who upset Mr. Lieberman in the Democratic primary in August only to face him again as an independent in the Nov. 7 election, frequently criticizes the senator, charging that he supports the Bush administration’s “stay the course” policy. Mr. Lieberman insists that Mr. Lamont has distorted his record and taken his comments out of context.

A close examination of hundreds of Mr. Lieberman’s statements on Iraq over the past five years shows that while he repeatedly praised President Bush, he was far more likely to criticize him. But those critiques dropped off markedly in the last two years, even as the insurgency in Iraq gained strength. More