Two trillion dollars on Iraq?

From defense-aerospace.com:

The cost of the war in Iraq could eventually climb to two trillion dollars. That is two thousand billion dollars. US economist and Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and a colleague calculated the amount based on the assumption that US soldiers would be in Iraq until 2010, with a number of the troops being withdrawn each year.

Their calculation takes long-term costs into account such as paying sickness benefit to an estimated 16,000 wounded US soldiers.

A Defence Department spokesperson estimates that the war has cost 173 billion dollars to date. And each month it cost another 4.5 billion dollars. The White House came up with a much lower estimate of the costs before the war.

Makes you wonder what else it could have been spent on...

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum