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April 8, 2006
The Cost of the Path Taken, and Those Not Taken
The Economist has an interesting article this week considering the costs of the Iraq war (registration required). The article, which comes against the backdrop of a variety of recent (and sometimes eye-popping) estimates of the costs of the war, is interesting for two reasons:
1. It provides some sense of why it can be so hard to forecast things like the cost of the Iraq war, or even correctly gauge the costs already incurred.
2. It considers the costs of the likely alternatives to war (ie an ongoing and increasingly challenging exercise in containment). This is an important exercise. The projected costs of the war have prompted a great deal of (in some instances useful) debate about whether the war was justified. But in any such debate, it is important to recognize that the most realistic alternatives to war were not cost free. Indeed, they may, depending on events (ahh, events, dear reader, events), have been quite costly, for the US and Iraq.
Posted by dag at April 8, 2006 5:41 PM