The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes
Allen Lane, £20

WAR was, in ancient times, usually brutally straightforward; the victors simply paid for the cost of a campaign by plundering and wiping out the vanquished. Killing the losers and grabbing their loot paid the bills. It was clear cut and, anyway, Genghis Khan employed no accountants.

But with the advent of more complex modern warfare and its hugely expensive military technology, that simplicity was abandoned. Contemporary conflicts have turned into insupportable ongoing economic crises. So how do we pay for modern warfare? Or, still more apposite, how best to fool the voters about the process? For the truth is that no one - not even the authors of this excellent book - can adequately calculate the true costs of modern mutual destruction.

Yet Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have come closer than anyone else in making a credible financial assessment of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with their damning conclusion that the final costs will, frankly, impose unbearable burdens on any civilized society. Or, more likely, they will be disguised and spread across numerous generations yet unborn.

It is a massive lesson to all of us - especially our political leaders - about the absurdity, the sheer suicidal futility of modern warfare. That alone seems a powerful reason to recommend this book to the widest possible audience.

Stiglitz is a world-renowned economic guru, Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist of the World Bank while Bilmes is a lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard. Together they have compiled a devastating indictment of United States foreign policy under George W Bush in which Great Britain, under Tony Blair, is irredeemably associated.

Consider just a sprinkling of the Stiglitz-Bilmes catalogue of cost as they attempt to break down The Three Trillion Dollar War:

l The US spends $16 billion every month on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - on top of “regular” defence spending.

l By the year 2017 the American taxpayer will have to finance $1 trillion in interest payments alone to cover the cost of borrowing that money.

l The total bill for the US will be - and the authors insist this is, deliberately, a conservative estimate - at least $3 trillion. They add that the rest of the world, including Britain, will probably have to find about the same amount again to cope with their own losses.

This book is full of mind-blowing facts about the social, as well as the economic, impact from the two wars. It also exposes the grotesque lies told by the Bush mafia - George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Richard Perle - to the American electorate.

So far more than 1.6 million US troops have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and all those who survive will be entitled to a minimum of two years’ medical care by the US government. Quite apart from this cost, there are hundreds of thousands of wounded American troops, some seriously damaged and requiring lifelong care; and there is a huge bill for disablement pensions. Beyond the basic military costs there are also massive bills to be paid to the private contractors - many of them part of the right-wing business clique around Bush - who pocket up to $1,222 a day - compare that with a US Army sergeant whose pay is between $100 and $150 a day. The tally of dollars is endless and frightening and Stiglitz is unremitting in exposing the Himalayan magnitude of the bills.

If there is one weakness in this remarkable book it is, I feel, its somewhat prosaic conclusion. Stiglitz and Bilmes propose 18 reforms for governments to consider before launching a future war - such as linking war costs to direct taxation and telling the truth about the real price of war. I would have liked more penetrating thoughts from Stiglitz - such as recognising that we have long passed the point when wars could help regenerate a nation’s economy by priming the pump of a slump in capitalism. Modern warfare devours scarce resources on an unprecedented scale; it also massively escalates the cost of vital materials, especially oil. Indeed, it is the cost of current wars that has helped create the current crisis of global capitalism and which now threatens the entire system. We should all recognise the direct link between the current debt crisis and the true cost of war.