Fun Facts About Iraq

The Iraq War cost $3 trillion. That's enough to end world hunger for 100 years. We chose differently. Here are the numbers.

A trillion is a very big number. It's bigger than a billion. I think it's made by adding lots of smaller numbers together until you get tired of counting. We got tired at three trillion, which is how much we spent making Iraq worse.

The Human Cost

100,000+ Iraqi civilians died. That's 35 September 11th attacks. We respond to one by starting a war that causes 35 more. The math is third-grade level, so the logic is mysterious.

4 million Iraqis lost their homes. That's the entire population of Maine, Idaho, and New Hampshire combined. They cannot all crash on your couch.

Liberation means setting someone free. We liberated 4 million Iraqis from their homes. Now they're free to live somewhere else, like a refugee camp or a foreign country that doesn't want them. Freedom is very complicated.

4,444 U.S. troops died. 98% male, 91% non-officers, 54% under age 25. We sent children to die. We call this "supporting the troops."

32,051 U.S. troops wounded. 20% are serious brain or spinal injuries. These don't count psychological injuries, because apparently those don't matter.

"Supporting the troops" means sending them to Iraq and then they get shot. I thought "support" meant helping someone, like holding them up so they don't fall down. But in military terms, it means the opposite. We supported them so hard that 4,444 of them died.

The Money We Chose To Spend

$900 billion spent through November 2010. That's approved spending. The real number is higher.

$9 billion just disappeared. Also 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles. We shipped them to contractors and nobody knows where they went. This is called "losing track" rather than "theft" because the people who lost track also approve the budgets.

I think $9 billion disappeared because money is very small and easy to lose. Like when you lose your keys, except instead of keys it's nine billion dollars. And instead of looking for it, we just printed more money and kept going.

$1 billion in equipment missing. Tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades. All gone. Probably fine.

$10 billion mismanaged and wasted. This is the official number from Congressional hearings, which means the real number is larger.

"Mismanaged" means you managed something badly. The opposite would be "well-managed," which is when you don't lose a billion dollars of equipment. We chose the first option because the second option requires paying attention to where things are.

$1.4 billion in Halliburton overcharges deemed "unreasonable and unsupported" by the Pentagon. They paid anyway.

$20 billion paid to KBR (formerly part of Halliburton) for food, fuel, and housing. Pentagon auditors questioned $3.2 billion of this. We paid that too.

$5,000 spent per second in 2008. That's the sound of money burning.

$390,000 to deploy one soldier for one year. We could have paid them $390,000 to stay home and saved money on ammunition.

Graph Source: http://awesome.good.is/transparency/013/transparency013trilliondollarwar.html

Supporting The Troops By Sending Them To Die

47,000 U.S. troops remained after all other nations withdrew. Apparently we were the only ones who didn't get the memo.

316 non-U.S. troops died. 179 from the UK. They figured it out faster than we did.

30% of returning troops develop serious mental health problems within 3-4 months. We don't count these as casualties because that would make the numbers look bad.

75 military helicopters downed. At least 36 by enemy fire. Helicopters cost money. People don't, apparently.

Graph Source: http://www.wallstats.com/blog/us-troop-stength-in-iraq-and-other-data/

The People Who Actually Live There

180,000 private contractors in August 2007. That's more contractors than troops. We privatized war. The invisible hand of the market now holds a gun.

146 journalists killed. 97 murdered, 49 in acts of war, 14 by U.S. forces. Apparently some people didn't want this documented.

9,889 Iraqi police and soldiers killed as of January 2011. We trained them to fight and then they died. This is called "building capacity."

100,000+ Iraqi civilians killed according to secret U.S. government documents released by Wikileaks. The UN says this is "significantly under-reported" and estimates reach 600,000. We're not sure because we didn't count. You don't count things you don't care about.

Graph Source: http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.nl/2011/01/2010-ends-with-slight-drop-in-iraqi.html

55,000 insurgents killed. Roughly estimated, because we're better at killing than counting.

572 non-Iraqi contractors and civilian workers killed. People came from other countries to help and died.

306 non-Iraqis kidnapped. 57 killed, 147 released, 4 escaped, 6 rescued, 89 status unknown. We're not great at keeping track.

The Insurgency We Created

Daily insurgent attacks:

February 2004: 14 attacks per day
July 2005: 70 attacks per day
May 2007: 163 attacks per day

Insurgency strength:

November 2003: 15,000 fighters
October 2006: 20,000-30,000 fighters
June 2007: 70,000 fighters

We invaded to fight terrorists. We created more terrorists. The math is simple. The logic is absent.

An insurgent is someone who fights against an occupying force. We became the occupying force, so people started fighting against us. Then we called them insurgents. Before we invaded, they were just people living in Iraq. After we invaded, they became insurgents. It's like magic, except instead of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, we pulled 70,000 fighters out of a country we destroyed.

Life in "Liberated" Iraq

2.25 million Iraqis displaced inside their own country as of May 2007.

2.1-2.25 million Iraqi refugees fled to Syria and Jordan. We freed them from their homes.

27-60% unemployment where curfew isn't in effect. Those are Depression-era numbers. We brought them democracy and unemployment.

50% inflation in 2006. Food costs double. Wages don't. This is called "economic freedom."

28% of Iraqi children chronically malnourished in June 2007. But 72% aren't, so clearly things are going well.

40% of professionals left Iraq since 2003. The smart ones fled.

34,000 physicians before the invasion. 12,000 physicians left after the invasion. 2,000 physicians murdered since the invasion.

We killed the doctors. Then wondered why healthcare got worse.

Doctors are people who make sick people better. When you kill the doctors, there's nobody left to make sick people better. So sick people stay sick, and then they die. I'm not sure why we killed the doctors. Maybe we thought Iraqis didn't need healthcare anymore because they were liberated.

Baghdad electricity before the war: 16-24 hours per day Baghdad electricity after liberation: 5.6 hours per day

We made electricity scarce. This is called "spreading freedom."

Electricity is what makes lights work. Before we liberated Iraq, lights worked for 16-24 hours per day. After liberation, lights worked for 5.6 hours per day. So freedom makes lights work less. I always thought freedom meant having more choices, but apparently it means having less electricity.

37% of homes connected to sewer systems. Most people live with raw sewage. We spent $3 trillion on this.

70% of Iraqis lack adequate water. Water doesn't work but at least we brought democracy, which also doesn't work without water.

22% of water treatment plants rehabilitated. We broke the rest. "Rehabilitation" implies they're getting better. They're not.

Graph Source: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4228

What Iraqis Think About Being Liberated

82% strongly oppose coalition troops. We liberated them. They want us to leave. The disconnect is notable.

Less than 1% believe coalition forces improved security. We spent $900 billion. Less than 1% think it helped. The return on investment is poor.

67% feel less secure because of occupation. We made them less safe. While spending money to make them safer. This is either incompetence or lying, and both are bad.

72% have no confidence in multinational forces. Three-quarters of the people we're "helping" don't trust us. This is called "winning hearts and minds."

Poll taken in Iraq in August 2005 by the British Ministry of Defense (Source: Brookings Institute)

Graph Source: http://www.good.is

What You Can Do

The war is over. The lessons aren't learned. Here's how to prevent the next one:

Track military spending - Check the National Priorities Project to see current military budgets
Follow contractor fraud - Monitor the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System
Contact representatives - Use specific numbers from this article when asking questions
Remember the math - $3 trillion could have ended world hunger for 100 years

Data presented as of March 31, 2011, except as indicated.

Sources

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