The Real Cost of the Iraq War

Sixty billion, 239 billion, 2.2 trillion dollars. The more such figures swirl, the more necessary it is to change the question. The real matter at hand is not, "How much will it cost?" but, "When does it start to matter?"

Vietnam Tipping Points

The answers provided by past experience are imperfect. The Oxford Companion to American Military History places the direct costs of the Vietnam War at $173 billion (equal to $770 billion in 2003 dollars). Veterans benefits and interest payments add another trillion to Vietnam's costs, calculated in 2003 dollars. Thus, the estimates for the cost of the Iraq war already place the two conflicts at similar levels, although Vietnam expenditures represented a larger percentage of the Gross Domestic Product.

There seems to be no single point at which costs become too great. Different parties reach their moment of decision at different times, independently determining that "victory" is not worth the price being paid. Disaffection builds as financial and human costs rise. And so looking at turning points, in Vietnam or in Iraq, involves twisting the question once again. We must ask not only, "How costly is too costly?" But also, "Too costly for whom?"

For many who opposed the war on moral terms, the conflict was too costly from the start. The lives and money sacrificed since then merely serve as tragic affirmations of a conviction already reached. Others more traditionally supportive of presidential decisions to take the U.S. to war can, however, be swayed by mounting costs, once victory doesn't come.

One Vietnam tipping point came in late 1967 when, for the first time, opinion polls showed that a bare majority of Americans considered the conflict a "mistake." The size of this majority surged after the start of the Tet Offensive in January 1968. In a watershed moment in the wake of that onslaught, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite both echoed and solidified public sentiment by famously indicating that U.S. could not win the war. "To say we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past," he told his television audience. "To say that we are mired in a stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion."

Bad news from the war front helped to turn the public, but domestic dissent went far in shaping public reactions to developments abroad. The same 1967 polls that registered the first antiwar majority also showed that most Americans deplored the growing antiwar movement. Nevertheless, antiwar protesters had a critical (and sometimes unexpected) impact. Historian Melvin Small offers one example of when "the antiwar movement dramatically affected policy": After mass protests at the Pentagon in October 1967, "Lyndon Johnson launched a public relations campaign that emphasized how well the war was going. When the Communists [then] launched their seemingly successful nationwide Tet Offensive most Americans felt that they had been deceived by their own government."

A turn in elite opinion followed on the heels of public disaffection. Although rarely remembered, the defection of a previously supportive business community formed an important part of this shift. A lack of business enthusiasm for the war sprang from military developments in Vietnam, but was also spurred by war-related economic doldrums (which have resonance today). As Small explains, "For many economists, the last truly good years for the economy were 1962-65 with almost full employment, very low inflation and a favorable balance of trade." As the war escalated, "an increasingly unfavorable balance of trade, related in part to spending for the war abroad, contributed to an international monetary crisis involving a threat to U.S. gold reserves in 1967-68. That threat helped convince some administration officials and Wall Street analysts that the United States could no longer afford the war."