US withdrawal from Iraq is a beginning, not an ending | Simon Tisdall

An interesting summary of the state of play in the (despite US withdrawal) ongoing war for Iraq. Not so much mission accomplished as mission abandoned.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/14/us-withdrawal-iraq-beginning

What always staggers me is the sheer cost of it all - 4,500 lives and $700bn.
While impossible to evaluate death tolls, it is worth at least comparing it to the ~3000 that died in 9/11, which provided so much momentum for this endeavour.
Though of course, it pales in comparison to the 30-40,000 who die each year
in US traffic accidents (source here), an annual tragedy that seems to pass by unnoticed.

The dollar cost is easier to deal with. My favourite statistic to compare against is the amount spent annually on cancer research - which I've seen (for example here ) to be ~$15bn globally per year. That means the US invasion of Iraq was equivalent to almost half a century of worldwide cancer research.
Or to compare to the road death toll - with 254 million cars on the road in the US, $700bn would work out as ~$2,700 per car. If there was a safety feature costing this much which reduced accidents by just 1%, then in that 10 years instead of losing 4,500 american lives, 4,000 could have been saved.

And of course, if cancer and road deaths are just too mundane and boring, and the money was to be spent on something as spectacular and which would bring as much global attention (but this time with praise), then the Iraq war would have funded at least 3 entire space shuttle programs, or 28 Apollo programs.

Bush seized one terrible opportunity in Iraq, and squandered so many wonderful ones...