What's the Tab?

In their original 2006 academic paper on this topic, Stiglitz and Bilmes estimated the war's price tag at $1 trillion to $2 trillion. Now they're at $3 trillion, and Stiglitz seems comfortable going higher; he recently told Bloomberg News that the true cost is "much more like $5 trillion."

A trillion here, a trillion there -- pretty soon the line between "estimate" and "guess" gets a bit blurry. On occasion, Stiglitz and Bilmes appear to overreach. They often count the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together, and they find ways to link all manner of bad things to the U.S. invasion. For example, because solutions to global problems such as AIDS, climate change and poverty require U.S. leadership, and because the Iraq war has diminished Washington's moral standing in the world, the war is worsening AIDS, climate change and world poverty. Really?

Stiglitz has been a bit of a hero to the left for his widely read critiques of globalization, and The Three Trillion Dollar War promises to garner much attention as well. Excerpts have appeared in U.S. and international publications, and the book is set to be translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

To no one's surprise, the White House already has dismissed its conclusions. "People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure," White House spokesman Tony Fratto recently told reporters. "What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn't his slide rule work that way?"

Stiglitz and Bilmes should be commended -- not disparaged -- for their painstaking work. But war critics should weigh the numbers carefully. "We're grateful to him," Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) gushed over Stiglitz at the congressional hearing. "His book title speaks for itself."

Except it doesn't. The book's title suggests a level of precision that is not borne out in its pages. The book's stronger lesson is the sheer range of costs -- and foregone opportunities -- that the authors ably identify.

"In one way or another, we will be paying for these costs, today, next year, and over the coming decades -- in higher taxes, in public and private investments that will have to be curtailed, in social programs that will have to be cut back," they write. "One cannot fight a war, especially a war as long and as costly as this war, without paying the price." *

Carlos Lozada is a deputy national editor at The Post.