Last week the media continued to bravely ignore the findings of Nobel Prize winner (as opposed to nominee) Joseph Stigliz and Linda J. Bilmes that Bush’s March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq will cost the United States economy $3 trillion…at least.

So well-qualified, well-credentialed, award winning economist uses government statistics to analyze things and finds the War that was supposed to be full of flowers, sweets, and paying for itself, turned out to be 0 for 3.

Against such devastating statistics and analysis, against such sober and expert opinion you need to roll out someone capable of meeting them on the intellectual playing field.

Sadly, all you have is Christopher Hitchens. Although, if it can be divided easily by fifths, Hitch is your man.

Their lame joint effort to affix a cost to the Iraq war is entirely based on an unspoken assumption that has nothing to do with economics or even with political economy. And that assumption (widely shared but seldom if ever articulated) is that our engagement with Iraq was somehow "a war of choice" — to use a favorite catchphrase from a few years ago — and thus that all of its costs, ranging from the physical damage to Iraqi infrastructure to the moral damage to our warriors, could have been avoided by abstention.

I don’t know anybody who knows anything about the subject who believes anything so frivolous.

Apparently, Hitchens suffers from the misnamed Pauline Kael syndrome (something the late Ms. Kael never actually said but Snitchens just did).

The statement of Hitchens, of course, is patently false and the last line of his opening salvo, such as it is, continues the intellectual bankruptcy of war supporters — that ONLY serious people choose to launch wars and occupy other countries. You know people like George Bush and…wait for it…Saddam Hussein by this logic.

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Doug Feith are not serious people. They are dangerous ones.

And since the whole point of Hitchens piece seems to be some unquantifiable and intolerable policy that was containing Saddam prior to Bush’s invasion one might ask why he never provided those costs?

Because they were working and comparatively cost effective…$1.4 billion a year for enforcing the "No Fly Zones" in Iraq.

So in five years we would have spent…adjusting for inflation maybe…MAYBE $9 billion. And that’s considering that oil might have jumped to $50 or $60 a barrel. Which, as we all know, is simply intolerable!

Now, thanks to George Bush we spend $1.4 billion in Iraq in about 3 days.

So really, thank goodness for this invasion…because it has been such an outstanding deal all around.

(pic from jsz0)